Pyramids

The Arc of Pyramids

The pivots — what forced Pyramids to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Tape-Trading Collective

   The 2008 self-titled debut was built through the US postal service with musicians mailing physical tracks back and forth without ever sitting in the same room. Balling acted as a weird curatorial conductor, splicing together Contributions from members of Lycus and the Embree brothers. The result was a suffocating, anonymous wave of blackgaze that sounded entirely disconnected from any local scene. You hear it in the blown-out, buried vocals and the sheet-metal guitar hiss that dominates those early tracks.

2. 02

   The Collaborative Split Years

   Between 2009 and 2012, Pyramids stopped working in isolation and started colliding head-on with the heavy underground's most prominent outer-limit artists. They cut collaborative records with Canadian ambient-doom duo Nadja and North Carolina psych-metal outfit Horseback. These sessions forced the band to stretch their long-form songwriting, trading their short, jagged bursts of noise for massive, side-long drone suites. The climax of this run was the split with Mamiffer, which brought Faith Coloccia into the permanent lineup and injected a cold, neo-classical piano minimalism into the band's DNA.

3. 03

   The Technical Evolution

   When A Northern Meadow dropped in 2015, the tape-loop fog cleared to reveal a shockingly intricate, mathematical beast. Bringing in Vindsval from Blut Aus Nord to contribute guitars pushed the band into avant-garde black metal territory. The production got sharp, icy, and surgically precise, with Colin Marston's mastering job separating the dense layers of synth, double-kick drums, and clean, choral vocal arrangements. It was a complete rejection of the lo-fi aesthetic they started with, opting instead for a cerebral, terrifyingly clean assault.

Influences

• Blut Aus Nord — Balling has explicitly cited the French avant-garde black metal project as a primary blueprint for Pyramids' drum programming and non-traditional guitar work. You can hear this direct lineage in the cold, industrial-tinged blast beats and disorienting chord structures on A Northern Meadow, which Vindsval actually played guitar on.
• My Bloody Valentine — The band used Kevin Shields' signature glide guitar technique as a foundation for their dense walls of white noise, a connection Balling confirmed in early interviews regarding their guitar tracking methods. The opening tracks of the 2008 debut take the reverse-reverb wash of Loveless and run it through a black metal distortion pedal.
• Cocteau Twins — Pyramids' reliance on heavily treated, wordless vocal melodies as an instrument rather than a lyrical delivery vehicle comes straight from Elizabeth Fraser's playbook. On Into the Silent Waves, the vocals float above the metallic screech like a distorted take on Heaven or Las Vegas.
• Godflesh — Justin Broadrick's pioneering use of rigid drum machines under massive, detuned metal riffs is the backbone of Pyramids' early rhythmic structures. The mechanical, unforgiving pulse on Wvndrkmmer directly mimics the cold, factory-floor beat of Streetcleaner.
• This Heat — The experimental post-punk band's loop-based studio assembly methods heavily influenced how Balling constructed Pyramids' early recordings through tape manipulation. You hear this in the jarring edits and repeating, hypnotic noise loops on the self-titled album.