If you look under the hood of Car Bomb’s Tiles Whisper Dreams EP, you’re going to find a twisted metal landscape of tech-death complexity, heavy shoegaze subversion and engine-cracking djent-outs custom-built to keep you on edge.
Take Blindsides, a multi-chambered monstrosity wherein guitarist Greg Kubacki uses a Fractal Axe-Fx to tone-warp chords as a motion-sick nod to My Bloody Valentine, then undulates through mock-gear-shifting texturalism like a renegade NASCAR driver, and then heads into a dangerously off-kilter rhythmic parabola that makes it sound like Car Bomb are about to come to a catastrophic end.
“I’ve always been fascinated with rhythms that sound like they’re speeding up and slowing down, but are in a particular time,” he says of that tense push-and-pull and how it’s meant to throw off listeners. “You get this perception of a certain tempo while we’re thinking in another one.”
Like the other two irregularly shifting pieces on the EP, the New York City veterans’ first release since 2019, Blindsides is an ideas-jammed enterprise. Not everything makes it off Car Bomb’s assembly line, though, as evidenced by a recent Instagram post promoting a vibrato-and-tap laden, yet ultimately unused solo of Kubacki’s.
At the suggestion of co-producer and Gojira guitarist Joe Duplantier – whose Queens-based Silvercord Studio was used to track drums – they pulled that out of Blindsides to focus on Jon Modell’s walking bass and a temporarily melodious vocal from more-generally rage‑howling frontman Michael Dafferner. The section now finds Kubacki gliding through a subtle octave-shifter melody inspired by Cave In’s spacey use of the Boss PS-3 pedal.
“We were like, ‘Why don’t we just do that, because it’ll be easier if I don’t have to do another solo when we play this all live,” Kubacki says with a laugh.
Since forming in 2000, a major part of Car Bomb’s heavy aesthetic has been the guitarist’s percussive, picking-hand-panicked presence. That rhythmic intensity continues through the drop G-to-drop-Ab rumbled Tiles Whisper Dreams, but Kubacki also notes that he’s spent the past few years busying up his left-hand work.
That’s what led him toward the new EP’s chromatic death-metal licks, tap-crazed micro-solo improvisation and pitch-shifted “high-note randomness.”
“We’ve been guilty of doing a lot of the Meshuggah, machine-riff stuff where it’s always [working the] right hand and you’re leaning into one note,” he says. “It always sounds great, but every once in a while, you gotta throw something else in there.”
If you need convincing about Car Bomb’s prowess, consider Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid’s endorsement of Tiles Whispers Dreams as the best guitar riff of 2025 (from our January 2026 issue).
“They’re a maelstrom, a rising tide of shards,” Reid says. “The sound of a tank groaning just before it bursts, sending a flood of molasses… They are implacable. Impossible. Unflinching.” Who are we to disagree?
- The Whisper Dreams is out now via Bandcamp.
