Gold Lamé Overcome Self-Imposed Challenges on New Single “MONSTERA”

The experimental post-rock duo’s new album GOING drops October 7.
First Listen

Gold Lamé Overcome Self-Imposed Challenges on New Single “MONSTERA”

The experimental post-rock duo’s new album GOING drops October 7.

Words: Mike LeSuer

September 14, 2022

I think we officially left the Math Rock Era behind when headlines started referring to Hella’s drummer as “Death Grips’ Zach Hill,” yet the echoes of that mid-2000s movement flourish in various corners of music today well beyond industrial hip-hop. For the experimental post-rock duo Gold Lamé, that influence shines through most noticeably in their adherence to the technical details of the genre’s forebears Don Caballero and the way composition, for them, often seemed more like a set of challenges to overcome than a free-flowing creative collaboration. 

This mentality certainly comes through on the latest cut from their forthcoming debut album GOING, with “MONSTERA” creating an ever-shifting, sedative soundscape that picks up directly where the album’s previous track leaves off. “We started the track with a shared challenge: to create a song that starts with the distorted percussion loop at the end of ‘FROST’—kind of like how Don Caballero’s What Burns Never Returns starts with the drum pattern that closes Don Caballero II,” Matt Lemay and Todd Goldstein share.

“Todd created the song’s initial structure and sonic universe, centered around an almost kalimba-like bass part,” they add. “Matt began reversing some sections to create a woozy backwards effect (at one point we imagined the song might end up a palindrome, played the same backwards and forwards). From there, Matt added a blown-out live drum take, Todd burnished the details, and ‘MONSTERA’ was born.”

Hear the final result below, and pre-order GOING—out October 7—here.