Mask Appeal arrived without preamble in the summer of 2024, the sort of band that seems to have been waiting in a back room for the door to open. A jam session turned decisive. The music landed already assembled, as if memory had been jogged rather than invention attempted. Ideas come forward for them with the confidence of those who have been circling the same instincts for decades.
On their hypnotic new single Ancestors, the rhythm section asserts itself immediately. Mike Shelbourn’s drums operate by jungle logic, ceremonial but unbound, pushing the song forward through repetition and pressure rather than propulsion. Dan Graziano’s bass moves beneath with deliberate sinuosity, a line that coils and tightens, occasionally brushing against Death Cult’s ritual cadence before slipping into stranger terrain. Together, they establish a physical order: the body registers before the mind, motion before meaning.
Ancestors functions as the EP’s axis. Its drums roll with patient insistence, compressing time through repetition. The voices feel called forth rather than captured, as if the song has opened a channel instead of constructing a scene. White Aliano’s cries break through with sudden clarity, summoning presences that feel close, unsettled, awake. Dante White Aliano’s guitar enters as a destabilizing force. Notes smear and split, less shaped than released, drawing on damaged elegance and violent abstraction without tipping into reverence. His voice recounts devotion aimed at what cannot be reached. Desire here is not dramatized; it is examined, paced, and allowed to breathe.
What surfaces carries recognizable bloodlines: The Stranglers’ tensile unease, the Contortions’ crooked physicality, the clipped authority of Public Image Ltd., the feral volatility of The Birthday Party, Bow Wow Wow’s percussive bite, Bauhaus’ nocturnal restraint…yet everything arrives spoken in the present tense, alert and unencumbered.
The video for Ancestors unfolds as a ritual rather than a narrative. Faces fracture and reassemble through mirroring and repetition, rendered in blues, purples, and reds that feel closer to bruises than cosmetics. Figures move through a wooded clearing draped in saturated cloth—crimson, violet, black—bound together by rope like a shared inheritance that cannot be shrugged off. The camera treats the human form as something unstable: doubled, inverted, multiplied, occasionally dissolving into abstraction before snapping back into recognition. What emerges is not symbolism to be decoded but atmosphere to be entered, a visual extension of the song’s fixation on lineage, memory, and the uneasy persistence of what precedes us.
Watch the video for Ancestors below:
The EP’s five songs arrive quickly, almost recklessly, yet each carries its own internal order. That coherence extends to the artwork (hand-painted by Gitane Demone), which frames the music as an art form to be revered rather than a product to be commodified. Mask Appeal sounds like a band less concerned with arrival than with recognition. This music knows where it comes from, and it moves forward without explanation, sure of its footing, alert to the body, awake to the past still breathing nearby.
Listen to Ancestors below and order the EP here.
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