On Old Mill, the penultimate track from Chalk Teeth’s self-titled debut, the Los Angeles trio turns repetition into an engine of dread. Chalk Teeth’s geographical history – Los Angeles by way of New York City and Oakland – feels audible in the song’s mixture of downtown abrasion, warehouse discipline, and West Coast scale. Karolina’s eerie Polish vocal rises through the mass with a cold clarity, delivering an apocalyptic dream of flaming galleons suspended in the sky.
The title began as Miller’s working name for the track, chosen before he understood Karolina’s lyrics. Its images of smoke, spinning metal blades and burning lumber happened to meet her vision midway. The song seems governed by accidental correspondences: disco electronics and noise rock, dream imagery and physical labour, ecstatic movement and looming catastrophe. Those elements collect without becoming cluttered, because the trio understands how to leave a severe melodic line exposed inside the distortion.
Her guitar, sharp and glacial, cuts across Wallace’s broader sheets of noise, producing a tension between precision and collapse. Each instrument appears to push against the others, yet the song remains locked to its central motion, advancing with the indifferent certainty of industrial machinery. A drum-machine pattern circles with the severe patience of early electronic body music, while Jason Miller’s bass and sequences establish a hard, metallic floor beneath Adam Wallace’s overdriven guitar. The opening suggests a malevolent cousin to Charanjit Singh’s 12 Ragas to the Disco Beat, rerouted through John Carpenter’s anxious minimalism, before the arrangement swells into a dense collision of fuzz, feedback and blunt rhythmic force. The hypnotic drone also calls to mind the sinister undertones of Lebanon Hanover and the catchiness of Pixies in the curious backbeat.
Wallace’s accompanying video extends that logic into a piece of expressionist street theatre. The band hauls a railroad tie through an industrial district, maneuvers black geometric fabric, and breaks into abrupt, awkward dances that recall silent cinema without settling into pastiche. Shot by cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke near the group’s North Hollywood studio, the clip benefits from the blunt texture of its surroundings: concrete, debris, vacant lots and the peculiar civic afterlife of discarded materials.
The railroad tie itself was found in the middle of the road after the band failed to source one, an intervention from North Hollywood’s vast informal archive of rubbish. Carried through the frame, it resembles a relic, a burden and a corpse. Chalk Teeth become pallbearers for obsolete American infrastructure, escorting it toward an unknown sentence while Old Mill churns behind them.
Watch the video for Old Mill below:
Chalk Teeth’s Old Mill is severe, strange, and physically persuasive: dance music for a factory condemned by fire, still operating after everyone has fled. Its violence is controlled, its imagery lucid, and its propulsion strong enough to make catastrophe feel briefly communal, even strangely celebratory, under immense pressure.
Chalk Teeth’s self-titled debut album is out now as of June 26th on DNTL Records.
Listen to Old Mill below and order the album here.
Catch Chalk Teeth live on the West Coast!
- 8/4 Los Angeles – Gold Diggers
- 9/4 San Francisco – TBA
- 9/5 Portland – The Six Below Midnight
- 9/6 Seattle – Barboza
- 9/12 Los Angeles – Bar Sinister
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