Open Head 'What Is Success'

'What Is Success' finds Open Head sculpting sound from steel and shadow. The Kingston, NY quartet draws inspiration from brutalist architecture, decaying industrial forms, and the ghostly detritus of the Hudson Valley, creating an album that feels as much like terrain as music. Their blend of no-wave abrasion, avant-punk energy, and experimental sprawl is raw, stratospheric, and tactile—delivering heaviness not just in sound but in presence.

Channeling the grit of Sonic Youth, the urgency of Fugazi, and the layered intricacy of King Crimson, 'What Is Success' is both cerebral and visceral. Its songs expand and contract like ruined monuments, built on distortion, repetition, and sudden fractures. A record as concerned with the concrete as with the abstract, it doesn’t ask the question so much as hammer it into the walls: What is success—and what does it cost to chase it?