Tritonic: Alexamenos!
Tritonic Return with Blazing New Single “Alexamenos!”
…and Announce Their Uncompromising Second Album Bend the Arc! (Cassette Only, No Streaming)
by Jack Rush
Like a burst of light shot from your solar plexus, “Alexamenos!” is Tritonic’s most immediate and accessible work to date—a sledgehammer hit of sludge colliding with ecstatic power-pop guitar duels. Out now on Spotify and other streaming platforms, it’s a rare digital release from a band otherwise sworn to the tactile and the tangible.
Built around handmade fretless guitars, the track channels the punishing weight of Acid Bath with the soaring, twin-guitar drama of Baroness, forging something both wildly heavy and emotionally luminous. That choice to go fretless is key: a deliberate act of destruction and creation that rejects the clean lines and fixed notes of traditional instrumentation, and instead opens a pathway toward tonal ambiguity, chaos, and infinite expression.
Its DIY music video matches that ambition. Constructed entirely from practical effects—kit-bashed spaceships, coloured ink in water, and gold paint detonations—it imagines a cosmic journey across a medieval T and O map, where ancient time and sci-fi future merge in a fever dream of symbolism and destruction. The tension between analogue and digital, body and signal, myth and machine, seeps into every moment.
“Alexamenos!” may or may not feature on Tritonic’s upcoming second album, Bend the Arc!, but it sets the spiritual tone for what’s to come. Due out November 23, 2025, the album will be released exclusively on wax-dipped cassette—with no digital version planned. To hear it, you must choose to engage with it physically. Even playing the tape requires destroying the artwork—an intentional metaphor made real. Tritonic want you to participate, not consume.
Bend the Arc! is a record shaped by confrontation and contradiction. It asks: If the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, who bends it? And what must be sacrificed for that bend to occur? Creation through destruction isn’t just a theme—it’s the operating principle.
Musically, the album explodes genre boundaries. While rooted in sludge metal, doom, punk, and hardcore, it mutates through noise, musique concrète, free jazz, trad jazz, prog, indie, and even the lingering ghost of nu-metal. And as with “Alexamenos!,” all guitars were custom-converted to fretless, introducing intentional variance and imprecision into genres that often fetishize perfection. By eliminating frets, Tritonic chase the infinite.
During the making of Bend the Arc!, the band imposed a strict creative discipline: every sound must physically “touch” the world. That means no direct digital inputs, no prefab samples—only live-recorded, found, and physically manipulated sounds. Even samples had to be sourced and recorded by the band, amplified and processed in real space.
Despite—or because of—these constraints, Bend the Arc! achieves a sprawling, richly textured sound. Ferocious punk breakdowns give way to elegant piano and percussion arrangements. Walls of noise dissolve into moments of striking clarity. There are echoes of Liturgy, Talk Talk, and These New Puritans, but Tritonic remain defiantly their own thing.
If Bend the Arc! is austere and demanding, it’s also deeply sincere. In an era where radical sincerity is often diluted into indie-pop cliché, Tritonic make sincerity dangerous again. The album doesn’t offer easy optimism—but it burns with conviction. By pushing their art beyond convenience, comfort, or commercial logic, Tritonic aren’t just making music. They’re making a point.
“Alexamenos!” is out now on all streaming platforms.
Bend the Arc! is available for pre-order on wax-dipped cassette—out November 23, 2025.
Have a listen and connect with Tritonic:
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