Aluminum announce the album Iconoclast HaHa and share Killing Time

Aluminum have announced a new album, Iconoclast HaHa, due October 30 through Felte, and released its lead single Killing Time along with a video. It is the San Francisco four-piece's second record.

The band are Marc Leyda on vocals, guitar and sampler, Ryann Gonsalves on vocals and bass, Austin Montanari on guitar and Rick Altieri on drums. Gonsalves wrote Killing Time out of the frustration of living inside a system that sets you up to fail, where you are always not enough or too much.

Leyda framed the album more broadly, describing much of it as coming from the ambient stress and uncertainty of the present moment and the way that bleeds into both external and internal reality. The two accounts point at the same thing from different angles.

Gonsalves also directed the video, and its idea came from a routine. She cleans a small beach off the Bay some mornings, picking up styrofoam, lost shoes, shotgun shells and drink cups, and imagined all of it moving along a grocery store conveyor belt. Leyda said they wanted to show the commodification of the individual next to the waste American society produces.

The recording was deliberately heavier than the band's 2024 debut, Fully Beat. They worked with engineer Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden Studio in Oakland and tracked through Marshall stacks, aiming for a faster, more punkish sound that would carry in a live room.

Iconoclast HaHa runs to 13 tracks, opening with Give Me a Reason and closing with Skip, with Killing Time second in the order. The album is logged on the release calendar for October 30.

Shoegaze has kept producing records at this scale on independent labels, and Aluminum's guitar-first approach puts them in the rock and indie overlap. Liz Harris reuniting her shoegaze band Helen is another sign of the same current.