Once a famously fractious noise band, the trio continues its slow transformation into an unpredictable and surprisingly tender rock group.
Just after the start of this century, Magik Markers felt like a spectacular explosion that would soon burn through all available fuel. A noise-rock trio that earned the back half of that hyphenate chiefly by virtue of playing drums, guitars, and bass, the Markers were famously belligerent, ripping into audiences that appeared apathetic while ripping riffs and rhythms into shards. It was exhilarating and exhausting, the kind of spectacle that never seemed to account for sustainability. But for the last dozen years, the Markers—once maniacally prolific—have slowed their schedule and softened their attack, seesawing between the pastoral wallop of Crazy Horse and the fragmented beauty of Kim Gordon. Though most people continue to associate Magik Markers with that early racket, they’ve now been getting weird on the other side of the hyphenate for most of their career.
If the nine-song 2020, the Markers’ first album in seven years, doesn’t finally recast their primordial reputation, it’s hard to imagine anything will. They mostly tuck the dissonance and bedlam beneath the surface of these tunes, like a weapon hidden between hem and skin. That restraint highlights the band’s surprising breadth on their most diverse set of songs yet. “That Dream (Shitty Beach)” is the kind of blast from the garage Ty Segall might howl; its chaser, “Born Dead,” is a tender Mellotron-and-guitar waltz detailing cosmic loneliness and salvation. The opener is a guitar anti-hero epic, its elliptical solo gathering direction and distortion across the song’s exhilarating second half. The finale, however, is a woozy pop lullaby for the dispossessed, like Julee Cruise coming back to earth.
None of this is to say that Magik Markers now sound “normal.” In July, they released a four-track preamble to 2020, stretching Elisa Ambrogio’s spectral voice across smeared guitars and refracted meters. Those pieces felt wonderfully surreal, like hymns spirited from a distant galaxy. The centerpiece of 2020 is “Hymn for 2020,” an eerie collage of long phosphorescent tones, sporadic drum thuds, and vocals that conjure ghouls and angels. It’s like huddling inside a tornado shelter as a twister races by outside—a momentarily safe space, burdened by knowledge of what’s on the other side of the door. Ambrogio intones the brittle “CDROM,” a seven-minute tone poem about astrology, psychedelics, and extreme existential angst, with a coolness that suggests she’s succumbed to these worries. Her dazed voice and acidic guitar, along with Pete Nolan’s roiling drums, recall the dread that precedes a panic attack.
But by and large, Magik Markers’ longtime touchstones, abrasion and arrhythmia, add depth to these songs without dominating them. “Born Dead” never gets too pretty or plain, since the country licks sometimes sour and Ambrogio occasionally loops her voice like she’s her own shadow. “That Dream (Shitty Beach)” might be the Markers’ most thundering rock song ever. It’s an open-road, windows-down jam in a very unexpected and literal sense—whipped by static and a sense of vertigo, the song sounds as if it were recorded in a convertible careening down the highway, wind lashing the microphones. “You Can Find Me” is a perfect power-pop song about adolescent frustration; you may wonder, though, if it were bashed out inside a crinkled aluminum can and captured with dying recording gear.
Amid the lurid excess of their beginnings, Magik Markers bucked against any expectations they encountered, from songform to the understanding of where the stage ended and the crowd began. They punished their instruments as often as they played them and avoided any semblance of a straightforward catalogue by releasing whatever whenever. The thrills were sudden and pure. But it’s been even more satisfying to watch the Markers—partners, parents, adults with solo or side-projects and day-jobs—mature into a singular rock trio, funneling all their ire and wonder and doubt and humor into enduring songs.
At its best, 2020 is as probing as those early paroxysms, asking similar questions with similar instruments in more developed ways. These songs plunder modern unease and desire, whether pining for deeper connections or wanting to escape an increasingly hostile planet. Against most odds, Magik Markers have become long-term reminders that settling down doesn’t mean settling, shutting, or stiffening up, even when you’re making less racket.
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