White Noise Sound: White Noise Sound

White Noise Sound: White Noise Sound

(Rocket Girl Records)

Download | CD

Louder Than War’s Banjo speaks to White Noise Sound as the cult psyche rockers announce a slight return, with a remastered reissue of their debut album and further releases to come.

White Noise Sound is perhaps a name that a lot of people would immediately recognise. But all that may be about to change.

Hailing from Swansea, White Noise Sound burst into my consciousness with the release of their eponymous debut album. Rarely had I heard a first record from a band that was so perfect; raw and brutal when the song suited it, languid and flowing when the opposite was true. They sounded to me like a band who had perfected their craft through years of hard gigging and lysergic experimentation, though I accept that this is probably not the case.

However they got there though, White Noise Sound were able to capture their sound perfectly in a studio to create one of my favourite debut albums of all time, ably assisted by Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom on production duties. Fans of Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized will find much to love here and should listen to this incredible journey of an album as soon as they possibly can.

For some reason, White Noise Sound’s flame seemed to burn bright but briefly, with the band all but disappearing off the radar after the release of their 2^nd album, Like A Pyramid Of Fire.

But this summer sees the start of a flurry of activity from the White Noise Sound camp. The debut album will be released in remastered form on 18^th July, and this will be followed up by an album of remixes and, early in 2026, a new live album.

The debut album, known by the tag WNS1, is a must for all fans of modern psych. First track Sunset sets out the band’s stall, with a fierce repetitive guitar groove reminiscent of Spacemen 3’s Revolution, all feedback and fuzzed-out guitars. In fact, there seems to be no end to the number of guitars on this track, with each new twist and turn of the song adding layer upon layer of further attack. The effect is similar to Loop’s chosen method of bludgeoning listeners into submission.

Even with such a ferocious attack, there is more going on behind the scenes. There are hints of keyboards and hidden melody in the midst of the maelstrom, and it is this rather than the wall of noise that points the way to the rest of the album.

Next track It Is There For You immediately pivots away from attacking the ears and focuses on seducing the mind. A hypnotic strummed bass line and a solitary bass drum lure us in, and a laid-back vocal floats around heads, both driving and relaxing simultaneously, as keyboard swirls add psychedelic texture. The song grows and evolves as we listen to it. Around the halfway mark, all instruments apart from the keyboard drop out, creating a spectral pause before all other instruments come rushing in ALL AT ONCE, revealing a song of almost dizzying highs and lows. Neither noise merchants nor ambient noodlers, White Noise Sound have both of these aspects of their nature at their control and can release them to devastating effect.

Fires In The Still Sea plays up to their ambient side, recalling the calmer moments of early Spiritualized gigs, with tremolo keyboards floating past. Knowing what we already know about White Noise Sound, it is tempting to imagine that this is but the calm before the storm, but next track There Is No Tomorrow resists this urge and begins with gently picked bass chords and a simple guitar line. Barely there vocals croon over the top of this, and White Noise Sound reveal one of their greatest strengths, the ability to put together massively catchy songs from sparse instrumentation.

This time, the song slowly builds, as it somehow grows with each turn around the verse and chorus. Halfway through the song, it has changed from a sparse patchy sound to a lush epic and then, just when you think all is well, a fanfare of brass instruments kick in and the song simply soars away. This build and fade is masterfully handled, and I had to check that the running time of the song genuinely was under five and a half minutes. It feels like it has been playing for hours and could quite happily continue for hours more. Superb, trippy stuff that, to my mind, has never been bettered in this genre.

Blood sees the scuzzed up guitars make a return, along with some huge-sounding drums and again would sound perfectly at home in a Spiritualized gig. These are not mere pastiches, though. White Noise Sound have their own identity running through these songs well enough to distinguish them from their peers. On its finish, Blood immediately segues into Blood (Reprise), where effects pedals rule and sound texture is all. The track ebbs and flows, lyrics and traditional structures are cast aside. This is the beating heart of White Noise Sound, an off-kilter soundscape that they can use as a platform to launch off into other songs.

No Place To Hide is a dark Pink Floyd acid trip that again creates melody that works its way under your skin using minimal instrumentation. Psychedelic rather than psyche, No Place To Hide shows White Noise Sound to be fearless when it comes to the construction of their songs. We are cast off from normality with little to hold us down while the song unfolds around us.

Don’t Wait For Me is a drone-based song that puts me in mind of films I’ve seen of the ’60s acid scene, with oil wheel visuals, the scent of weed in the air and a feeling of dropping out and tuning in. This fades in the album’s closing track, (In Both) Dreams And Ecstasies, with echoes of The Doors and Velvet Underground creeping in. Such nostalgia is kept limited, though, as the song again evolves and progresses, with a modern sounding synth line adding more twists and turns.

The keyboards become more prevalent, riding over the top of backwards guitars and strummed chords. It is a fitting climax to an album that has given us so many peaks and troughs, so many trips and voyages. By the end, it is easy to feel exhausted, travelled out. Battered but loved.

It is enormously good news that this album is being reactivated. I can think of no album this century that more deserves to be reappraised and reappreciated. Hopefully this time it will find the audience it deserves.

Along with all this activity, Louder Than War spoke to White Noise Sound’s Adam Tovey to find out how the band are able to make such incredible music and what has happened to them since.

LTW: I absolutely love White Noise Sound but, unlike most bands I love, I know next to nothing about them. Could you fill in a few gaps about how you all came together and how you came to write and record your songs?

“Thank you. We formed properly in Swansea in 2006.

Swansea is a small place – in lots of ways – but it sits in the shadow of the Welsh mountains, looking out into the expanse of the sea.  Looking back, the setting played as much a part in the mentality and the sound of WNS as did the set.

It was inevitable that we were drawn together. We were outsiders in a small pond – united by a shared desire to create something that we resonated with.  Creating music for any other purpose was never a consideration.

From the outset, we were as much about channelling atmospheres as we were about writing songs.  We write by immersion – the sounds we make are more like transmissions.

Long nights.  Loops.  Drones.  Dream machines… until something unusual flickers into form – then we follow it.”

LTW: Could you talk me through your songwriting process?

“We don’t write songs in the traditional sense. One of us might bring something to the table – a lyric, a pulse, a pattern – but the sounds were built in a ritualistic collective trance.

‘Sunset’, for instance, started life as an acoustic strummer – before it was distilled to two chords, underpinned with Pete Kember’s oscillating Synthi, slammed with an 808, brutalised with every distortion pedal we could lay our hands on, and the vocal transmuted into a chant to the setting sun… then the theremin got thrown around the room for good measure.”

LTW: One thing that strikes me about your two albums is how much they take from their producers. Do you think that is a fair comment or did White Noise Sound choose the producers to match their latest songs?

“It’s fair in the sense that we don’t see mixing and production as separate from songwriting.  Mixing and production are part of the composition, for us.

We’ve been lucky to work with people that we look up to. We learnt from Pete Kember, Cian Ciaran and Phil Kieran – they each brought their own dimensions to the sound, opened our minds, helped us form new shapes.

Sonic alignments – but it was always collaborative. They didn’t decorate the sound of WNS – they helped unlock it.

We’ll be forever grateful.”

LTW: Who were your influences on both albums?

“We’ve got a couple of Spotify playlists up on this.  The truth is that you’d get different answers dependent on who you ask.  The melting pot of influences meant we didn’t feel restricted in any way.  Completely unbounded.

I’d say Suicide, Spacemen 3, Neu!, Brian Eno – but our non-musical influences were every bit as formative… Gysin’s dream machine, Burroughs’ fold-in and cut-up techniques, Nietzsche… the static between stations… the list goes on.

There were also lots of great bands without massive profiles around at the time we were making both albums.  All of them pushed us to go further, in some way, whether they knew it or not.

The albums both document ‘altered’ states. The first album was about building our own wall-of-sound monoliths that we could get lost in. The second album was about transcendence – taking that sound somewhere new.  We weren’t interested in making the same album for a second time.”

LTW: I have been lending your albums out for years, and everyone who hears them loves them. Why do you think White Noise Sound weren’t more widely known?

“Thank you again!

There was no hype.  No slick PR machine. I guess it makes sense that we exist on the margins, given we didn’t make the music for anyone other than ourselves.  It was a consciously chimeric wall-of-sound.

Maybe that was never going to fit neatly anywhere?

We’ve always felt that the music has found – and will find – the people who were meant to find it.

Entrance not for everybody. Like a shortwave signal, only certain radios can tune into.”

LTW: What happened to the band? why did you split up?

“We didn’t split up. Life just pulled in different directions.

Silence is part of the circle, too.”

LTW: What’s the reason for the sudden flurry of activity?

“Rocket Girl got in touch about reissuing our first album.  Other opportunities and energies then presented themselves – and it felt right.

Our first album is being reissued July 18 – it’ll be available for the first time across all major platforms.  Streaming platforms were only in their infancy when WNS1 was originally released.

The next WNS transmissions are incoming.

Time folds.

Stay tuned.”

White Noise Sound is available on pre-order here 

~

Words by Banjo, you can find his Louder Than War archive here