Dumb Waiter return with another slab of explosive jazz-tinged noise rock – brutal, pummeling, and fascinating all at once.
Release date: July 31, 2026 | Independent | Instagram | Facebook | Bandcamp
A dumbwaiter – the tiny elevator used to transport food from one floor to another, maybe you remember seeing one in Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House – is a relic of a bygone era. Most houses have kitchens on the main floor now, after all. Separate the words out, though, and you have Dumb Waiter: Richmond, VA’s chaotic, noisy, and beguiling atmospheric jazz/grindcore quartet. They beg the question of what separates a dumbwaiter from a dumb waiter? Is the latter a clueless restaurant worker, or a simple grammatical error? If it’s an error, is it intentional? Or do they just like how it rolls off the tongue? You’re unlikely to find the answer by listening to their new album, the concisely titled Change, which boasts cover art of a starkly drawn house with legs, stylized on canvas and hanging on a wall. So far, so… what?
Like the disturbingly Disney-ish style of its cover, the music of Change wastes no time painting you a vivid picture of what Dumb Waiter are all about. “The Sun” begins by giving some poor uninitiated listener the wrong idea, its serene saxophone sounding like it could’ve adorned the Jasmine Myra or Miho Hazama albums I reviewed from earlier this year – but oh dear, that is not what we’re in for. ‘The cellophane covers me/There’s a hole where the sun used to be/Forget it, forget it‘ sounds like the insane ramblings of a madman, and the band wouldn’t have it any other way. “Bones” features repeated stuttered proclamations of ‘digging through con-con-concrete‘, and the title track, which taps into the hallucinatory no wave of latter-day Daughters, declares ‘I can only su-su-stain‘, like a junkie looking for his next fix. ‘Silly actors and geriatrics/See past it, their little clicks‘. What’s it all mean, exactly? Exactly.
“Drip”, with its hypnotic titular mantra, boasts lyrics about ‘squeezing time from an hourglass‘ and ‘grasping at thorns‘, which almost made me wince at the pain incurred in my hands from doing either. Saxophonist Tristan Brennis squelches out a line over Nathaniel Roseberry’s blastbeats, creating a haunting racket before the song’s final moments. The vocals sound dead as it fades out, just as they should. The following “Scratchers”, on the other hand, has a procedural feel to its refrain of ‘bag of rocks‘ and the modern delusional hell of ‘scratchers will heal me, you’ll see/once I win the lottery/rinse and repeat‘. Through the blunt vocal delivery and repetition, it conjures an image of society as zombies, going through the motions in hopes that everything will miraculously change for the better without any real effort being put in. That album title is coming into focus now, eh?
The music here is bleak, there’s no denying. One has to be in a subjective state of mind to enjoy the racket that Dumb Waiter cook up, but it reaps rewards for those inclined: the way “Wires” stumbles and lashes out like the town bully at the bar after too many drinks before its unsettlingly beautiful bridge of synths and cymbal washes, or the Chat Pile-esque stomp of the bass-driven “Less and Less”. Even the doomy “Memory” eventually breaks into a terrifying last leg of screeching guitars and sax, culminating in ‘I can’t remember when you could remember‘. The closing “Afraid of Everything” recalls the demented aura of Crippling Alcoholism (the two would make for great tourmates if that hasn’t happened already somewhere along the line), with shouted screeds and cat-getting-accidentally-stepped-on guitar screams.
There’s a lot to chew on across Change‘s 40 minutes, but an overwhelming sense of bad things about to explode is the most prominent feeling it leaves the listener with. I think it’s a hoot.
