The London quartet return with an uncompromising second record that demands destruction, creation, and participation
London’s Tritonic have never been a band content to play within the lines. Their new album Bend the Arc!—out November 23, 2025—pushes that ethos to its breaking point, asking listeners not just to hear, but to choose. Issued exclusively on wax-dipped cassette with contracted singles and videos online, the only way to experience the full album is to destroy the artwork itself. In doing so, Tritonic collapse the boundary between audience and artist: passive listening is not an option.
At its core, Bend the Arc! wrestles with monumental questions: if the moral universe bends toward justice, who is there to bend it? How much destruction is necessary for creation? Through sludge and doom metal, hardcore and punk, and their deliberate rupturing with noise, free jazz, prog, and musique concrète, Tritonic craft a sonic manifesto that refuses optimism while remaining deeply sincere. Austere in tone but rich in texture, the record conjures moments of overwhelming intensity—pummeling crust-punk onslaughts give way to lush piano passages, dueling guitar freak-outs dissolve into hypnotic gongs, and every sound is touched by the physical world, recorded live with no direct inputs or pre-fabricated samples.
The band’s decision to strip frets from their guitars exemplifies this duality of destruction and creation: rejecting precision in favor of infinite possibility. Frontman Peter Jewkes, alongside Jonathan Oh, Ben Smithers, and Rob Channon, anchor the chaos with intent, aided by Victoria Bernard’s spectral guest vocals and producer Mark Estall’s tactile mixing at Marketstall Recording. The result is a work as much about metaphysics as it is about music—atheists and agnostics searching for the sacred within sound itself.
Since their origins in the Maldives and their debut Port of Spain, Tritonic have consistently fractured the hardcore template, embracing heresy as methodology. If 2022’s Algae Bloom was a brief flare of directness and noise-joy, Bend the Arc! is its counterweight: willfully impenetrable, thematically unified, a record that aims for infinity and finds, paradoxically, something human.
With Bend the Arc!, Tritonic don’t just stretch the definition of heavy music—they rewire its very contract. To engage is to act. To listen is to bend.
