Xiu Xiu go deeper into Eraserhead

Xiu Xiu's second pass at David Lynch is the harder of the two, and it is not a song record. Eraserhead Xiu Xiu, out July 10 on Polyvinyl, is seven tracks of drone, sound collage and musique concrete played and recorded by Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo. For most of its length it takes things away. The closer hands them back.

Xiu Xiu is Stewart's band, formed in San Jose in 2002 and named after the Chinese film Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. Seo moved to the front of the project with Dear God, I Hate Myself in 2010, and the catalogue runs from Knife Play in 2002 to 13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips in 2024. The history that matters here starts in 2016, when the band released and toured Plays the Music of Twin Peaks with the blessing of Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti, then retired that concert in 2018. In July 2025 they pulled their catalogue off Spotify over Daniel Ek's investment in AI war drones.

When Lynch died, the requests arrived to bring the Twin Peaks show back. Xiu Xiu went the other way and further into the earlier film: a live concert with an accompanying film, and this album as the other half of it. The record's guide is Eraserhead's original sound design and score by Lynch and Alan Splet. Stewart and Seo played and recorded at Krankenschwester in Berlin. Alan Douches mastered it at West Westside Music in New Windsor, New York. Joe Stewart did the design. In Heaven, Peter Ivers' composition, came out as the advance single on May 19, 2026.

The album is nearly all instrumental. Organ, modular synths, field recordings, homemade instruments built for specific concerts, flashlights, electrical interference and the habits of musique concrete, arranged to build rooms rather than tunes. The darkness never lets up and never explains itself. Viento opens and runs longest, and it sets the terms: no beat to hold, no chorus on the way, just a stretch of time you have to agree to before anything else happens.

Sleep Synth and Tetra work the same arc. Each begins close to nothing and ends in clobbering, grotesque cacophony, the floor dropping out in slow motion. It is the record's signature move, and it lands.

The back half is faster and shorter. Steampipe and Ether are brief and functional, and Ether works as the hinge between the collapse and what follows it. Smashy Smashy is the sharpest cut here: playful and terrifying in the same breath, a joke told with the lights off. Then In Heaven arrives with soft, delicate vocals and closes the record quietly.

You already know if this is yours. If Ignore Grief and Girl with Basket of Fruit are records you put on on purpose, the film and the live show are extras rather than prerequisites, and the album stands without them. If you came to Xiu Xiu through Plays the Music of Twin Peaks and wanted the tunes, this is not that record and will not turn into it.

What does not work is the middle. Sleep Synth and Tetra share an arc and a payoff, and heard back to back the second one plays as a rerun of the first. Apart from the film, some of this is texture you have to build a room around yourself.

That leaves Eraserhead Xiu Xiu at 3.5: a record that knows exactly what it is doing and takes longer doing it than it needs to, with a closing track that pays off the patience. The noise is the argument, and In Heaven is why you sit through it.

The tracklist

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