negative_crush

Love is a fragile and violent emotion, its essence both immediately familiar yet entirely unknowable, its power both gripping and intoxicating in equal measure. 

The debut album from negative_crush, “invisible_weapons”, is the latest attempt from prolific producer Tyler Newman to distill the most powerful of human feelings into a single devastating musical expression. Best known for his work in the industrial rock scene, as the main engine behind Battery Cage and Informatik (both Metropolis Records acts), he returns with an album driven entirely by his own vision. 

“negative_crush is my new band…I got tired of working with other people, and wanted to challenge myself to make a record where I did one hundred percent of the work on my own. I used a lot of first takes, and occasionally left in mistakes…echoes and heartbreaks…”

The record is a monolithic slab of guitar driven machine noise, powered by the angst generated when human connections become meaningless, and nearly every song is heavy enough to break your heart to pieces. Despite the blackened layers of distortion, the songs still retain a structural core that nearly conforms to pop music, even when they appear to be literally disintegrating through your speakers.

“Words alone can’t explain it. It’s pain and love and sex and death and a million other emotions all happening simultaneously. I made a record that perfectly encapsulates my experiences of the last several years…a photograph fading out into eternity…”

Due to his insistence on performing, recording, and engineering entirely on his own, the album took nearly four years to complete from start to finish. Despite using a mixture of acoustic and electronic sources, it remains difficult to tell which parts are programmed or performed live; indeed it can often be hard to know whether any individual sound is made by a guitar or synthesizers. 

“My ultimate goal with the record is to make people want to jump off their roof. In my mind, it’s as close to emotional quicksand as any record I’ve ever heard. There’s a universal need to see one’s pain inflicted on others, and this album is the only one I’ve ever made that expresses it so completely.”

In the vein of many of the artists who heavily influenced “invisible_weapons”, such as Jesu, Nine Inch Nails, and My Bloody Valentine, the album is the product of one man’s need for total creative control, compressed into it’s own solitary statement. It will challenge you to either love or hate it, but in the end there will be no room left for indifference...

This album started because I needed to make something that felt real. Not polished, not collaborative, not cleaned up — just something that came straight from where I was, without anyone else filtering it.

negative_crush is just me. No bandmates, no producers. I wrote it, played it, recorded it, mixed it. A lot of it was first takes. Some of it was me keeping the mistakes because they felt more honest than the perfect versions. It took almost four years to finish, partly because I was doing everything myself, partly because it was hard to let go of.

invisible_weapons is heavy, in more ways than one. It’s noisy, it’s distorted, it’s sometimes harsh — but there’s melody underneath it all. I think of it as pop music run through a shredder. It’s emotional, but not in a way that’s easy to explain. I wasn’t trying to make something that fits into a genre — I was trying to get something out of my system.

The songs came out of isolation, disconnection, heartbreak. Not just personal stuff, but this broader feeling of everything falling apart. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the sounds are guitars or synths or both — that line kept blurring, and I leaned into it.

People have compared it to Jesu, NIN, My Bloody Valentine — I hear that, but I wasn’t aiming for anything specific. I just wanted it to feel raw and real.

It’s not for everyone. But if you’ve ever wanted music to punch you in the chest and whisper something strange in your ear at the same time — this might be for you.