Noise rock and New Zealand are hardly traditional bedfellows in the global music press imagination, its landscape still largely referenced via the pastoral, shimmering jangle of the “Dunedin Sound.” Yet, to ignore the archipelago’s history of sonic dysfunction is to miss some of its most vital output. Beneath the indie-pop canopy lies a lineage of low-frequency terror and corrosive post-punk: the bone-shattering industrialism of The Skeptics, the jagged wall-of-sound assault of Gordons, the hypnotic distortion of early Bailter Space, and the esoteric subterranean outliers like Girls Pissing On Girls Pissing. Factor in population size, and you have a country that punches absurdly above its weight (it’s taking every ounce of strength to avoid the dreaded “per capita” suffix here).
Enter LUNG. Active for over three decades with roughly ten releases scattered across their lineage, the Wellington-based trio remain one of the underground’s most stubborn and delightfully unvarnished secrets. On their latest album, Fog, they do not so much perform noise rock as they exhume it, belting out a glorious brand of abrasive, and delightfully unhinged art-punk that wallows in its own mess.
The seeds of Fog were planted with the same manic, low-budget immediacy that has fueled LUNG since their late-1980s origin in Palmerston North. Recorded and mixed over just a handful of days in October 2025 at The Surgery in Newtown, Wellington, with engineer Lee Prebble handling the desk (and a vintage Echoplex), the album captures a band operating in a state of pure, unfiltered impulse. Mastering duty was handed off to James Goldsmith, while the physical artifact (a 12-inch slab of translucent red vinyl “impregnated with toxic FOG”) was released in January 2026 via Yellow Bike Records.
The band’s core trio of frontman Dave White handling guitars, keys, and vocals, Zak White on drums and album artwork, and James Woods laying down the grinding basslines embraces an uncompromising DIY ethos. A microcosm of this process is captured in the music video for the album’s opener, ‘Isolated Gun’. Shot, directed, and edited by Alan Beere of TrustFundKid111 in under 30 minutes in the narrow hallway of Dave White’s home, the visual was finished and delivered the same day.
LUNG’s method is one of feral efficiency. ‘Isolated Gun’ itself acts as a temporal bridge across thirty years of band history, stitching together the frantic lyrics of ‘She’s Got a Gun’ (from their 1991 debut, Cactii) with the hypnotic, heavy-footed pulse of ‘Isolation’ (from 2024’s LUNG Cancer). It’s an exercise in self-cannibalisation that feels natural for a group whose discography operates like a self-perpetuating organism.
Fog opens with the aforementioned ‘Isolated Gun’, a track that immediately locks into a filthy, low-slung groove driven by Woods’ thick bassline and Zak’s metronomic pulse. When Dave White’s guitar hits, it hits with the unpredictable, razor-wire danger of The Jesus Lizard. A cathartic burst of static framing a narrative of unhinged mania. It is catchy despite its muddiness, using its raw, cacophonous chorus as a Trojan horse for catchiness.
The record is stacked with these brief, hyper-focused blasts of punk hostility. The sub-two-minute ‘Blood Clot’ bristles with nervous energy, preserving studio chatter and raw directional cues that highlight the album’s live-in-the-room urgency. Yet Fog avoids the trap of becoming a monotonous, one-note beatdown. The band frequently detours into weirder, more theatrical territory. ‘RALPH’ slows the tempo into a murky, psych-adjacent post-punk crawl, anchored by guest vocals from Maryanne and Dave’s antagonistic quips.
Then comes ‘eXtra Spank’, a track that can only be described as a piece of demented, carnival-esque hysteria. Pushed forward by frantic punk drumming and cheap, squelching synth keys, it shifts tempos with dizzying unpredictability, playing out like the absurdity of a freak show at an unsanctioned carnival. These same unsettling, fairground-adjacent keys return later on ‘Panda’, reiterating LUNG’s sense of playfulness is just as potent as their aggression.
When the band hits their stride on the punchier cuts, the delivery is delightfully confrontational. On ‘Recycle Man’, Dave barks the title with a mocking cadence “Recycle-cycle-cycle-cycle…” you can basically feel the drops of spit landing on your face. Contrast this with the title track, ‘Fog’, which opts for atmospheric dread over speed. It wallows in a cloud of reverberating vocals and gloomy, off-kilter instrumentation, eventually dissolving into a thick haze of emotive, feedback-laden noise. ‘Firestarter’ mines a similar vein of slow-burn anxiety, reining in the chaos just enough to allow a sense of melancholy to creep through the distortion.
The album’s centerpiece and longest track, ‘TR*UNT’, opens with a display of Zak’s tribal drum prowess before sinking into a heavy, doomy guitar riff. The instrumental foundation here is among the most satisfying on the entire record with its crushing, hypnotic loop that wallows in its own weight. If anything, the heavily processed, bizarre vocal effects layered over top feel slightly unnecessary, and being more of a distraction from the cyclic riffs that are at their best when they’re given the space to breathe.
By the time the record reaches its climax, all restraint is abandoned. ‘Deaf in Both Ears (Kawasaki reprise)’ is the scorched-earth finale, throwing a relentless barrage of noise at the listener until the tape runs out. It is unhinged, merciless, and a fitting end to a record that’s measured its success in structural blemishes.
LUNG would have you believe they are merely a messy, zero-volts-given noise rock outfit operating on pure instinct. They are, of course, exactly that, but Fog reveals them to be far more clever than their bruised knuckles suggest. Across its tight 35-minute runtime, the album relies on stylistic shapeshifting to stay vital, balancing rapid-fire punk bursts with carnival synths, doomy riffs, and murky, ambient feedback.
Fog is a testament to the persistence of the oft-overlooked New Zealand underground: loud, stubborn, beautifully abrasive, and utterly indifferent to consumer demands.
FFO: Sonic Youth, The Fall, The Jesus Lizard, The Birthday Party, Big Black, Butthole Surfers, Gordons, Skeptics, Bailter Space, Girls Pissing On Girls Pissing.
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