White Noise

Scapegoats make music for the moment the emergency broadcast becomes the emergency.

The band’s blend of stoner rock, doom weight and scorched alternative metal has always moved slowly enough to watch the damage happen. Early material established their preferred landscape: abandoned suburbs, poisoned skies, failed systems and ordinary people continuing to mow the lawn because nobody has officially told them to stop.

White Noise expands that landscape into a full transmission from somewhere after the warning sirens. The guitars are tuned low enough to disturb buried utilities. The drums advance with enormous, patient force. Vocals emerge through the mix like instructions heard from a bunker loudspeaker three streets away.

“Scorched Earth” provides the blast radius: a huge, crawling piece built from heat, repetition and the suspicion that survival may have been an administrative error. “Model Citizen” is even stronger, pairing a rusted, monolithic riff with lyrics about obedience, appearances and the quiet violence beneath a perfect neighbourhood. It is the sound of a white picket fence casting a mushroom-cloud shadow.

The album artwork’s nuclear-test suburb is not merely decoration. That contradiction—domestic normality staged beside total destruction—runs through every song. Television sets flicker in empty rooms. Public information repeats after meaning has gone. Static becomes both atmosphere and refuge: if the signal is unclear, perhaps the news has not happened yet.

For such a heavy record, White Noise is carefully controlled. Scapegoats know when to let a riff breathe, when to withhold impact and when to make a guitar sound like the sky has developed machinery.

MERINGUE! asked whether the album contained a message of hope.

The band played us forty-seven seconds of static.

Richard says it clearly told him to contact Sandra.