Born not in the shadows of a scene but in the crucible of exile, Tritonic is a band whose very origin defies convention. The seed of the band was planted in the most unlikely of places, the Indian Ocean, where Peter Jewkes found himself living in exile in the Maldives. Isolated and introspective, Jewkes began to shape a musical vision rooted in dualities: creation and destruction, clarity and chaos, sacred and profane. Upon his return to London, he reunited with lifelong friends and sonic conspirators, Jonathan Oh (guitar, vocals), Ben Smithers (bass, vocals), and Rob Channon (drums, percussion, vocals), each bringing with them not only musical pedigree, but a willingness to dismantle genre and rebuild sound from the ground up. In 2015, Tritonic released Swimmer EP, an exploratory work that immediately established their disregard for boundaries. But as suddenly as they had assembled, the band members scattered again across the globe, Kenya, Switzerland, the United States, each journey adding new textures and philosophies to their craft. When they reconvened for their 2020 full-length album Port of Spain, it became clear Tritonic is an evolving manifesto.
The album flouted hardcore orthodoxy, embracing indie melodies and pop sensibilities, even as it stared directly into the abyss. By 2022, their Algae Bloom EP fused gospel, math rock, big beat and polemic into a 12-minute sonic explosion, prying open the genre lines of punk and hardcore with force and finesse. Yet, this flirtation with lightness and directness would be short-lived. With their 2025 opus Bend the Arc!, Tritonic embraced a stark philosophical austerity. The album\’s sound, crafted entirely from physical, real-world audio sources with no pre-made samples or digital inputs, was a radical act of rebellion against modern music\’s digital convenience. Guided by spiritual inquiry and sonic experimentation, the band wielded fretless guitars they modified themselves, deliberately inviting dissonance, ambiguity, and imperfection into genres that often fetishize control. Driven by deeply theological themes, despite the members being atheists and agnostics, Tritonic began to pose uncomfortable questions through their music: If the world is broken, who gets to fix it? What must we destroy to create anew? Their sound became a spiritual exercise in noise, a ritual of rupture and reinvention.
Like a beam of cosmic light bursting from the solar plexus, Tritonic’s new single Alexamenos! released June 8, 2025, is a blinding collision of sludge metal weight and power-pop brilliance. The track is a sonic invocation that explores the tension between the ancient and the futuristic, the sacred and the absurd. Alexamenos! erupts with infectious, dueling guitar melodies, each riff crackling with raw voltage and metaphysical intent. Inspired by the infamous Alexamenos graffito, an ancient Roman image mocking a Christian worshipper, the single is both a mockery of belief and a lament for its loss, a thunderous hymn performed not in reverence, but in confrontation.
Visually brought to life with an accompanying DIY music video crafted from kit-bashed spaceships, gold paint, and ink swirling in water, Alexamenos! dives headfirst into the spectacle of time collapse. Here, pilots of a crumbling future navigate medieval maps, glitching across dimensions where myth, memory, and digital decay intertwine. Unrelenting, metaphysical, and utterly spellbinding, Alexamenos! is not just a single, it is a ritual, a cry from the edge of history itself. In just a few minutes, Tritonic redefines what it means to make heavy music in the post-digital age. This is music with weight, both sonic and philosophical, forged from distortion and deep thought. Tritonic is no longer just bending arcs, they are bending time.
Tritonic’s Alexamenos! is a cataclysm of defiant expression and sonic invention, one that erupts with the fury of a band both philosophically bold and musically fearless. Right from the opening seconds, there’s a sheer urgency that doesn’t merely demand attention, it commandeers it. The track kicks off with a jarring grind of fretless guitar riffs, immediately setting an experimental tone that’s raw, acidic, and volatile. There’s no easing into the song, it grabs you by the collar and flings you headlong into a terrain where sludge metal and noise rock collide in a blaze of emotional electricity. The distorted textures feel ancient and futuristic all at once, a deliberate nod to the song’s deeper conceptual underpinnings.
Musically, Alexamenos! is a paradox: chaotic yet controlled, primal yet artful. There’s a powerful sense of layering as the instruments bleed into one another, distorted guitar wails like tormented laments, while basslines churn beneath like molten lava, relentless and dense. The drumming is razor-sharp, bordering on militaristic, grounding the sonic mayhem with rhythmic precision. The song’s structure shifts frequently despite its short runtime, its transitions are jagged, unpredictable, and almost ritualistic in their progression. At one point, there’s a moment of brief deceleration, like a breath before another plunge into madness. These shifts don\’t just change the tempo, they warp the emotional gravity of the song, bending it into new dimensions.
Vocal delivery in Alexamenos! is a revelation in controlled fury. The voice comes across as both sermon and scream, unfiltered, guttural, and unapologetically human. It doesn’t aim for melodic beauty but rather for a kind of prophetic abrasion. There\’s a spiritual anguish in the vocal tone, a lamentation fused with rage, as if the frontman is delivering a dirge to a forgotten god. The distorted vocal layering and occasional echoes give the impression of a multitude, as if a chorus of martyrs is rising from the catacombs. The performance doesn’t just convey words, it channels history, ideology, and mockery into every syllable.
What stands out most in this track is the relationship between the vocals and instrumentation, they don’t merely complement each other, they collide in a kind of ecstatic violence. The vocals ride atop the turbulence of the instruments, sometimes fighting them, sometimes fusing with them. It creates a soundscape that is intensely physical, almost tactile. It’s a ritualistic experience, drenched in reverb, crackling distortion, and thick with emotional tension. The use of fretless guitars adds an off-kilter, slithering quality, making the song feel like it\’s slipping through spiritual and sonic dimensions simultaneously. This isn\’t just music, it\’s invocation. The vibe of the song is cosmic in concept and subterranean in texture.
The visuals in the accompanying video, medieval maps, outer space motifs, and alchemical ink swirls, serve as a metaphorical extension of the music. The whole performance conjures a universe where the sacred and profane, past and future, myth and memory, are smashed together in a cathartic blast of creative nihilism. It’s the sonic equivalent of a crumbling fresco painted with molten gold and ash. What makes Alexamenos! such a triumph is its production quality. Despite its gritty, almost punk-like surface, the track is meticulously sculpted. Every shriek of feedback, every throb of bass, and every rasped lyric is placed with intention. The DIY aesthetic doesn’t equate to lo-fi mediocrity, it’s part of the statement. By releasing it solely on wax-dipped cassette, Tritonic leans fully into the artifact-like quality of their sound: something rare, tactile, and steeped in lore.
Listening to it feels like discovering a forbidden scroll or an ancient relic encoded with noise and prophecy. In the end, Tritonic’s Alexamenos! is less a song and more a ritual, a feverish hymn for the disillusioned, a genre-smashing relic forged in sound. It left me breathless from the first moment, gripped by the sheer audacity of its composition and performance. It’s a work of musical philosophy, wrapped in distortion, seething with theological commentary, and executed with raw artistic intensity. This isn’t just music for fans of sludge, punk, or metal, it’s a piece that challenges genre entirely, standing as one of the boldest experimental releases of the year. Tritonic has not just created a song; they’ve created a symbol, and its name is Alexamenos.
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