Pittsburgh band Blinder launches from the bunkers of the underground like an infrared homing device with the volatile, noisy shoegaze glory of new album Heatseeker.
Release date: October 28, 2025 | Independent | Instagram | Bandcamp
Hanging flyers up in the nineties was a bit like screaming into the void. I remember walking up and down the streets of my small town of Norfolk, Virginia, armed with a stack of hand-drawn flyers and a staple gun, and accosting every other telephone pole as if I was breaking some sort of law or, worse, some sort of cultural norm. In the meantime, as I wrestled with thick layers of rusted staples, the city moved about its business in the background. Cars buckled under the overpass of 21st Street; endless streams of coal cars from the Norfolk-Southern train cut through the neighborhood like a locomotive alarm clock; the disheveled masses lined up outside the check-cashing place so they could walk next door to the liquor store and buy a pint. All of this was happening around me, and yet it wasn’t happening with me. It was the void. And I was in the middle of it.
Pittsburgh band Blinder is a bit like that. Their new album Heatseeker is screaming into that same void – thirty minutes of loud, celebratory shoegaze noise that revels in its own caustic energy. The band seems to wallow in obscurity, like one of the flyers I hung up south of 38th Street, where the gas stations went up against abandoned lots that went up against cold cinder block ‘gentlemen’s clubs’. They aren’t seen by many, but they exist and their very existence belies an intense purpose to their art. Ignore it at your own risk, the band seems to say. We shall rock, and rock loudly, until someone hears our screams. And these screams are worth hearing.
“The Gate” opens the album with a laid-back, confident two-chord assault. The guitars swim in reverb and chorus with vocals like wisps of wind atop the noise. But, what makes this band much more than just another third-wave shoegaze conglomerate are the swirling, psychedelic guitar solos. At the song’s midpoint, there’s a breakdown with some muddled spoken word before guitarists Ricky Petticord and Tim Brentner engage in some wild dual-guitar swinging.
Like something off of an old Thin Lizzy record, the guitar solo is a melodic turning point, tremolo bars bent like precision weapons, sending the song reeling into its noisy, groovy coda. Yes, eyes are still staring at the ground, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t aware of what the fuck is going on. It’s a striking opener, like the lid exploding off a soda water that’s been sitting in the back of the car too long.
“The Pour” feels like something that floated down from English rain clouds in 1993, flashes of Souvlaki echoing in the slow groove and the reverb-rich guitars. Bass player and vocalist Margo Van Hoy’s voice floats over the rhythmic foundation like Rachel Goswell from Slowdive, as the song takes its time to move through the overpasses and on-ramps of upper Appalachia in the fall. The song exists, like much of the album, as a moment in time. If you miss it, fine. If you don’t, well then stay awhile.
The songs on Heatseeker pass by in this kind of luminous space. The band itself even exists there. With less than a thousand monthly listeners on the monolithic streaming monstrosity of Spotify, they may be the least known band we’ve reviewed this year; this is a site that seems to revel in slowing things down to where we can look behind the alleyways and nooks and crannies of where we are to find the proverbial hidden gem.
And boy, is Heatseeker a hidden gem.
It’s a monstrous, heavy version of shoegaze magic. In a year where shoegaze seems to be making an unapologetic swing for the fences, unwilling to take another pitch, Blinder is playing a completely different sport. They’re out there on the diamond with a sledgehammer, a football, a few Sumo wrestlers, a cooler full of beer and, I guarantee, one of them has a pocketful of mushrooms on them.
From the blackgaze of Deafheaven’s Lonely People With Power to the more mainstreamed shoegaze of Wisp’s If Not Winter, and a good dozen bands in between that have produced confident, hefty slabs of heavily-affected guitar rock, Blinder seems to be at the psychedelic heart of all of these bands.
And psychedelia is where you’ll find “Talisman”, the album’s third song, firmly entrenched. It’s the sound of traffic, entropy, and guardrails – the orange cones and flashing lights of a night construction crew on a section of highway eternally under renovation. There’s a darkness to the piece that feels like the final breath before a sleep-deprived collision into the Jersey wall. Towards the end there is a frail, guitar (ukulele) arpeggio that winds its way through the noise. Falling out of tune is the same as falling into disarray, a song lingering into nothingness as if it’s just another way of escaping the void.
The song is an apt set-up for “Z”, which features some of the best guitar leads I’ve heard this year. Over a rudimentary chord progression that has no fucks to give, the two guitarists engage in an unapologetic metal apocalypse, whipping out every lick they can find within a minute. To say it’s unusual to hear this kind of guitar interplay on an album that’s so fully entrenched in the noise and atmosphere of shoegaze would be an understatement. Like Los Angeles black metal monsters Agriculture, Blinder has brought the guitar solo back to life in 2025, shaking off the soil of the grave with the skeletal fingers throwing devil’s horns with pride.
Album closer “Not You” has a surging confidence, a slacker-induced gaze that conjures up mystical vistages of Sebadoh and Pavement. Guitars swirl in and around each other, a wrought tangle of melodies that seem to tighten as the song takes its time to reach the finish line. Like most of the songs on Heatseeker, Blinder seems to revel in the creative process: there’s a melodic core in every single composition, but there’s a lot of loose rope to hang from in terms of how you interpret those melodies.
Like the flyers I canvased the streets of Norfolk with back in the nineties, the music of Blinder seems to burn fast and bright, before they wither in the bright sun of Earth’s daily rotation. Eventually stapled over, ruined by rain, or destined for weathering and erosion, Heatseeker is out there. The music of these Pittsburgh musicians is part of the grand tapestry of not just their gritty Pennsylvania town, but the greater cultural zeitgeist of the moment. Even if it’s just a mere rusty staple, or the frayed corner of an aging flyer, the sonic pieces of their explosive noise will linger in the atmosphere for a little while longer. Enjoy it while you can.
