There’s a kind of holiness in menace, and NYC’s Hostility Index makes their altar out of voltage and ruin. The Brooklyn duo. Dan Ahrendt and Steven Salazar (Shanghai Beach) move through the decayed corridors of post-punk and industrial like men searching for the bones of a lost machine. Their debut single, Evidence, is less a song than an invocation: a sinister stomper that claws its way through rhythm and repetition until it feels like ritual.
The track opens with a drum pattern that strikes like a warning: mechanical, deliberate, unmerciful. Bass grinds through the mix, alive with tension, while shards of synth flash like broken glass in dim light. Then come the voices: interwoven, pleading, commanding. Ahrendt and Salazar chant with a strange duality: one voice scorched by distortion, the other rising, half-human, half-specter. Together they conjure something both furious and entrancing, a collision of precision and chaos that evokes NIN’s desolation, Ministry’s mechanical fervor, the body-music urgency of DAF, and the vocal grandeur of Foetus.
Evidence feels like a séance conducted in an abandoned factory: steel echoing against skin, desire collapsing into devotion—the song spirals, pulling you inward with each circuit of its hypnotic refrain. There’s a vampiric hunger in the delivery, as if the voices were pleading for blood, or faith, or both. Each sound feels chosen, not composed: the hiss of feedback as confession, the distortion as absolution.
This kind of music thrives in that liminal place between ecstasy and decay. Hostility Index distills the pulse of New York’s underground into something visceral. Evidence is out now as a limited 7-inch vinyl, with only twenty-five copies pressed. A rare relic, it captures the sound of collapse made holy; a communion through noise.
Listen to the single Evidence below and order the 7-inch here.
Hostility Index will make their debut at Sleepwalk in Brooklyn on November 6th with Gargoyle.
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