American Motors
Art damaged minimalism or some other hyperbolic nonsense.
American Motors
Functional Music
“I know/it’s such a fucking cross/to bear.” – “Obvious” by American Motors
Is that a gnarly prayer? An apology, perhaps, right at the start of American Motors’ second record, Functional Music. Asking for forgiveness from the characters of these songs, for the world they are about to inhabit for the next 30 cathartic minutes. Where the duo’s debut, Content, built up the infrastructure of this janky dystopia – a decaying and collapsing landscape we all want to leave behind – Functional Music deals with the moody, morally ambiguous miscreants, nomadic on that landscape with nothing to lose. Waitresses scrounging for change, louses puking on their big boy boots, dirty kids learning about the apocalypse in real-time. As sleep-deprived and chemically dependent as they may be, there’s still humanity here. That’s reflected in the turn towards pure melodies and harmonies, and effervescent choruses, on this album. In that opening track, “Obvious,” seismic waves of guitars shimmering to counter the harsh message from the band. Are you humming along to a post-punk song? If in fact “there are no good old days, they’re just days,” there better be hope and power chords.
American Motors was established in 2023 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; not only to clear the drains, but to add that extra “post,” to cleanse the lives of those spent chasing the punk, post-punk, and heck, shoegazing dreams of a generation dosed by the DIY ideals of indie rock. Guitarist and vocalist Dustin White and drummer Alex Steward, both have traveled Lewis and Clark paths towards a musical salvation that put them within the magma. Their CVs too voluminous to get into now, but rest assured, they’re coast to coast post-rock journeymen who have spent just as much time rewiring the gear as they have screen-printing the ‘zines, putting on house shows, and intently studying the lineage of those who came before. So, in turn, the touring and stageplay around the cycle for Content, was natural. Now with Functional Music, a record made with even more intention, with grander ideals and sonic vision.
Like the snarky conceptual riddle of Content, its sequel, Functional Music is the opposite of wallpaper – it’s not music that sits complacent in the background. Songs like “No Horses” and “Margaritaville pt. 2” are steeped with inside jokes and harsh tones, but throughout, soaring bursts of shoegazing guitars (think Swervedriver, Slowdive, Moose) and minimalist atmosphere cut through the choking Pall Mall smoke. But is that smoke part of the atmosphere? The chug and grind of “5480 Big Tyler” (the title references a slum-lord cordoned apartment complex in White’s native West Virginia) and “Marlboro Miles,” still show the teeth of American Motors. The art of repetition and sonic blunt force trauma (think Shellac, the Birthday Party, Skin Graft Records). Touring member Andrew Krause provides the churling bass this time, and he’s synchronized with the bummer vibes that define American Motors.
Again, given the title – Functional Music – that should also trigger the ethos of using the studio as an instrument. It’s something White likely wouldn’t argue, as he’s often strategizing making art using a tech-inspired, gear-obsessed, head. Spare the nuances of latency and compression, or what may or may not have been used on Def Leppard's Hysteria b-sides being used here. Instead, in working with Jawbox’s J. Robbins again at his Baltimore-based Magpie Cage, there’s an existential contribution from the space in which this was created. Not only does Robbins know just exactly what to capture from American Motors, but the resinous spirituality of the studio, especially when it was OZ, is likely an intoxicating melange that informs the vibes, if not the music. Shudder to Think recorded there, Girls Against Boys, Brainiac, Velocity Girl, there’s not a particular thread between those bands but somehow it all makes sense. It fits.
“I don’t see the future at all.” – “Margaritaville pt. 2”
The band has hinted at the “New Hollywood” of the late ‘60s and ‘70s as a guide and inspiration for Functional Music. The vignettes of certain locales, snapshots of interior space where in those moments bad decisions are made and the mundane can be interpreted as profound and transformative. Peckinpah, Easy Rider, Bogdanovich. In that sense, you can see it as a neo-noir, blurred on a holler’s horizon. Each song is a scene here, and if that metaphor is too heavy-handed, try it out in your head. Follow along. You can see the psychic on the phone who can’t see the future, but only because it’s obscured by a crumbling wall of breezeblock. So is it the future, or just the future home of a center of some sort? Data or dialysis, it’s all the same. American Motors is what the teens doing inhalants behind the 7-11 are playing on a busted Realistic boombox. Believe it or not, they’re the only ones who can actually see the future.
For fans of: Shellac, Fugazi, Swervedriver, Slowdive, Five Easy Pieces, Hysteria b-sides, pull-tabs, Roland S. Howard, Killing Joke, Charles Portis’ Norwood.
Kevin J. Elliott
Columbus, Ohio
July 30th, 2026
It’s probably wise that one “post” is enough. Post-rock. Most “established” record stores have a “post-rock” or “post-punk” section, now, in roaring ‘20s, and every year, as we uncover how glorious those first few Killing Joke albums were, or how influential Magazine, or say, even Shellac, were to a nation of millions, the pile grows taller. And for every inch, there’s a upstart group of misfits in some part of Indiana or Zagreb aping the next iteration of “post” that becomes an en vogue apparition. And we can’t fault those zip guns, they keep the blood flowing. But how do we come full circle, how do we add a “post,” is there life after Red Medicine?
American Motors was established in 2023; not only to clear the drains, but to add that extra “post,” to cleanse the lives of those spent chasing the punk, post-punk, and heck, shoegazing dreams of a generation dosed by the DIY ideals of indie rock. Manipulating a post-pandemic narrative – because why can’t the narrative be manipulated now, by any means necessary? – is the duo of Dustin White and Alex Steward. Both have traveled Lewis and Clark paths towards a musical salvation that put them within the magma. Their CVs too voluminous to get into now, but rest assured, they’re coast to coast post-rock journeymen who have spent just as much time rewiring the gear as they have screen-printing the ‘zines, putting on house shows, and intently studying the lineage of those who came before.
White and Steward talk of an “instant telepathy” when they first meet in Austin. There was a shared sentiment that in that post-pandemic world, the duo wanted to make physical music. Physical in the sense of volume, physical in the sense of hitting your instruments hard. There was a love of early Swans; the physical tumult, and the dust that settles after the storm and stress explodes. In practice, the sound of American Motors pits an enormous and feral rhythm section vs. meditations in minimalism, new age tonality, and repetition.
“Colonial Lanes” is the perfect cultivation of this working-stiff cudgeling meeting its soft, ambient foil. With the scene set in a bowling alley dive bar, with the dredges (fallen angels?) of society “grinding their teeth from grinding those pills,” the song rides a giant, chasm filled, martial beat (the heartbeat from white crosses?), before making room for ripples of atmospheric guitar.
In a song like “The Former Mall Anchor Store Call Center Blues,” the title kind of says it all. At American Motors, the quotidian becomes mythical, just as the post-everything bassline hypnotizes the listener to see something “where a mountain used to be,” there’s beauty in the nothingness, the crusted nihilism, the Dollar General close to the other Dollar General. Here those ripples peek through again, or maybe they’re waves of synth, a snake-church oscillator, and they do it just as relentlessly as the forceful rhythms, the sturm und drang, like sunlight through cheap aluminum mini-blinds.
American Motors reflect that quiet sonic war. A leveling of post-expectations. You can have your corporeal catharsis and carve mazes in your brain at the same time.
“There is a Twin,” is as much Jawbox, as it is Hysteria, as it is Iasos, as it is some post-iteration of Rodan they’ve never heard, or those rediscovered K-Mart loop cassettes. As an anthem of sorts for the band it contains their multitudes, but also a strict code. So ingrained with that blueprint – a post-rock bedrock informed by the metaphysical and the rust and grain belts - the duo, along with bassist Brad Williams, recorded their debut with J. Robbins in Baltimore.
American Motors aren’t re-inventing the wheel as much as they are smashing it to bits, reconfiguring those bits into something that is what? A new wheel? Why not? This is one of those opportunities.
American Motors are:
Dustin Travis White and Alex D. Steward
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