PasteE

The Artist

Moin is a London-based trio featuring Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead of the ambient duo Raime, joined by drummer Valentina Magaletti. Emerging in the late 2010s on the influential Blackest Ever Black label before moving to AD 93, the group carved out a distinctive space between post-rock's angular guitar work and the sample-based abstraction of their electronic roots. Their sound is defined by tightly wound guitar loops, live drums that swing between krautrock precision and jazz-inflected looseness, and a fragmented use of found vocal snippets in place of a traditional singer. Paste arrives as their third full-length, extending the collage-vocal approach they developed on Moot! while pushing further into groove and texture.

The Album

Released in 2024 on AD 93, Paste was self-produced by the trio in London, built from live band takes cut up and reassembled alongside vocal fragments from a rotating cast of guest contributors. The production leans on dry, close-mic'd drums, angular clean guitars, and pockets of dense low-end, with the vocal cameos treated as another instrument rather than a lead line. It's a record about how meaning gets constructed and eroded through repetition, snippets of speech and singing looped until they blur into pure texture. The album continues Moin's practice of collapsing post-punk, post-rock, and electronic editing into a single sensibility while feeling more rhythm-forward than its predecessors.

Listen For

Magaletti's drum feel. Pay attention to how the drums on "Foot Wrong" and "Yep Yep" sit somewhere between tight rock playing and jazz phrasing, driving arrangements that would otherwise feel static.

Vocal fragments as instruments. Notice how the guest voices scattered across "Melon" and "Hung Up" function as loops and textures rather than storytelling, often repeating a phrase until the words dissolve.

Guitar as loop machine. Listen to the short, cyclical guitar figures throughout "In a Tizzy" and "Knuckle" and how small variations in dynamics reshape a two- or three-note pattern.

Space and dryness in the mix. The production largely avoids reverb, giving tracks like "Life Choices" a stark, close-up feel that emphasizes the physicality of each strike and string.

A recurring lyrical motif. Track how repeated phrases and single words act as anchors across "Forgetting is Like Syrup" and "Sink," turning language into rhythm.