MERZBOW - Tripleakuma (2026)
There is a kind of sound that wants to be sold to you as healing.
It arrives polished, padded, chromatically balanced, wrapped in words like “immersion”, “focus”, “deep listening”, “neural reset”. It knows where your anxiety lives and tries to rent the room next door. It promises regulated breathing, optimized attention, better sleep, cleaner productivity. The market has discovered the ear as a wellness device and, as usual, has immediately tried to domesticate it.
Merzbow’s TripleAkuma is not that.
Thank God, or whatever is left after the feedback has finished chewing the furniture.
This record does not soothe the nervous system. It does not create a safe acoustic environment. It does not invite you to become your best self. It does something far more interesting and far less polite: it asks what a self sounds like before it has been trained to recognize music as comfort, taste, identity, playlist, atmosphere.
Let’s start from scratch.
But here “scratch” is not a metaphor for beginning again from a clean surface. There is no clean surface. The scratch is the beginning. The scratch is the origin. It is the first wound of sound, the point at which noise stops being an accident and becomes a genealogy. Not “original” in the market sense, where originality usually means a slightly new arrangement of already sellable gestures. Originary, rather: something that seems to come before the distinction between signal and disturbance, before the ear has learned to ask politely for structure.
TripleAkuma sounds like a new genealogy of sound because it refuses to behave like a descendant. It does not feel like music that has inherited a tradition and then modified it. It feels like music that digs under inheritance itself, under the archive, under the reassuring idea that sound must justify its presence by becoming form. It is not shapeless. That would be too easy. It is form under pressure, form in a state of combustion, form refusing to become furniture.
The album moves through oscillations, frictions, electrical swarms, pressure fields. Sometimes the noise seems to thicken into a wall; sometimes it splinters into particles; sometimes it behaves like an animal trapped inside a machine that has started dreaming in metal. But what matters is not only intensity. Intensity alone is cheap. Any idiot can be loud. The point is that Merzbow’s loudness has depth. It has weather. It has strata. You do not listen to it as a surface but as something geological, as if each frequency were scraping against a buried layer of hearing.
And this is why I like it.
Not because it is extreme. “Extreme” is another market category, another little badge for people who need their discomfort pre-approved. I like it because it gives nothing back in the expected currency. It does not reward patience with melody. It does not convert violence into catharsis. It does not turn difficulty into prestige. It simply stays there, burning, and forces the listener to decide whether listening means recognition or exposure.
There is a moment, listening to TripleAkuma, when the usual question — “do I enjoy this?” — becomes stupid. Almost embarrassing. Enjoyment is too small a word here, too well-behaved. The album does not ask to be enjoyed in the normal sense. It asks to be undergone. Not passively, but with a strange kind of attention that has nothing to do with relaxation. You do not sink into this record. You stand inside it.
And then, if you stay long enough, something unpleasantly clear happens.
The noise stops being “outside”.
At first it seems like an attack coming from elsewhere: from speakers, circuits, Tokyo, Merzbow’s machines, some demonic factory of overdriven matter. Then slowly, or suddenly, it becomes harder to keep that distance. The record starts to sound less like an external event and more like the acoustic version of everything you normally edit out of yourself: impatience, panic, vanity, fear, brute appetite, stupid pride, the little theatrical self that wants to appear interesting even while listening to Merzbow.
That is the mirror.
Not a clean mirror. A bathroom mirror after a shower, covered in steam. You stand there with this album still tearing through the room, and with the palm of your hand you wipe away the vapor. Not elegantly. No cinematic revelation. Just a crude gesture. Skin on glass. A blurred face becoming visible.
And there you are.
Not improved. Not healed. Not optimized. Just seen.
That is the courage this record asks for. Not the adolescent courage of “I can tolerate harsh sounds”. Please. That is gym membership for the ears. The real courage is stranger: accepting that what feels unbearable in the sound may not be alien to you. That noise is not merely what culture excludes, but what identity requires in order to pretend to be coherent. Merzbow does not give you chaos. He removes the decorative lie that you were ever entirely ordered.
This is why TripleAkuma feels beautiful to me.
Beautiful not as in pleasant. Beautiful as in irreducible. Beautiful as in something that cannot be translated into the language of benefit. In an age where sound is increasingly treated as a tool for mood management, TripleAkuma is useless in the most necessary way. It does not help you work. It does not help you sleep. It does not help you become calmer, smarter, more productive, more aligned with your goals. It does not care about your goals. It looks at the whole little industry of psychoacoustic self-maintenance and answers with a scream made of electricity, dust, and origin.
And maybe that is the point.
To begin again from scratch is not to erase noise.
It is to understand that noise was there first.