Guerilla Toss came up in Boston as a noisy, hyperactive punk band and moved to New York in 2015, the year their first release on DFA came out. Twisted Crystal, released on 14 September 2018, is their third album for the label in three years, after Eraser Stargazer in 2016 and GT Ultra in 2017. Drummer Peter Negroponte summed it up before release: Eraser Stargazer was their funk and dance record, GT Ultra their take on modern pop, and this one “is like a classic rock record”, with nods to Bowie, krautrock and 1970s prog, “some Madonna and Grace Jones” and “lots of lead guitar”.
The band produced it with Josh Druckman, who tracked it and mixed it at the Outlier Inn, and the album notes credit Negroponte with shaping and polishing the new sounds. Joe Lambert mastered it. The line-up was Kassie Carlson on vocals, Negroponte on drums, Arian Shafiee on guitar, Sam Lisabeth on keyboards and a new bassist, Stephen Cooper of Cloud Becomes Your Hand. The notes name the old machines that stayed, a Sequential Circuits Six-Trak synthesizer and a Clavia drum machine, and the reference points: the Slits, ESG, Gina X and early Madonna, with Carlson’s half-spoken delivery pointing to Laurie Anderson, Grace Jones and Lizzy Mercier Descloux. Carlson said the new songs leaned on 1970s and 80s German krautrock, with repetitive, driving beats and metallic guitar tones. Shafiee brought non-Western tunings and pitch-shifted harmonies, and Pitchfork pointed to Eventide effects behind its heavy reverb.
“Magic Is Easy” has a wobbling bass line and an extended guitar solo, both singled out by reviewers, which makes the classic-rock claim literal. “Jesus Rabbit” asks Jesus to take Carlson off the planet as his “little rabbit”, set to a melody reviewers compared to a nursery rhyme. The album notes say Carlson grew up in a devoutly religious family and sang from the age of five, in large church choirs and in her family’s gospel quartet. “Meteorological”, the lead single, came out in July with a video by Giraffe Studios in which Carlson plays every part in a newscast gone haywire. Its chorus rhymes “natural” with “meteorological”, and reviewers read it as a song about moods as changeable as the weather.
“Walls of the Universe” is the longest track at 4:04, built on toms and layered vocals, with Carlson in a robotic voice travelling across the universe with a talking bird. “Come Up With Me” offers “mystery, space, new identity” as its pitch. “Green Apple” closes the record with green-apple incense, an instruction to listen to the drywall and a run of questions about whether you really saw what you think you saw. The vinyl adds a tenth song, “Unicorn Cigarette”, that isn’t on the CD or the download.
Critics were mostly warm, and Metacritic’s average is 79 from eight reviews. Pitchfork’s Margaret Farrell gave it 7.3, hearing sweeter melodies with touches of surf-pop, big beat and classic-rock showmanship, and noting that things still get weird. Exclaim! gave it 8 out of 10, AllMusic four stars and No Ripcord 8. Post-Trash called it the most accessible the band had ever sounded and put it at No. 41 on its list of 2018. The dissent came from Tiny Mix Tapes, which gave it three out of five: more confident than GT Ultra, it said, but “a little tidy”, with a look that promises a political edge the songs don’t deliver.
That complaint is fair, but it misses what the clean-up buys. The oddness moved into the details: Shafiee’s tunings, the spaceship effects, Carlson’s sing-speak over Negroponte’s drums. The questions in the lyrics stay open, and the record is happier asking them than answering. Nine songs in under half an hour keep it brisk. Guerilla Toss moved to Sub Pop in 2022, and in 2025 Stephen Malkmus produced their album You’re Weird Now at The Barn, Trey Anastasio’s studio in Vermont.
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