Neptune's Play Some Music is 32 years of scrap metal — and a tour in two days

Jason Sanford started Neptune in Boston in 1994 as a sculptor's project — fashioning guitars and basses out of scrap metal, saw blades, and hardware-store detritus. Thirty-two years and nine albums later, he's still building the instruments himself. On Monday, Bandcamp Daily named the band's comeback record Play Some Music Album of the Day. 1 The tour starts Tuesday.

Neptune's lineup on this record is Sanford on macrotonal guitar, feedback organ, and oscillators; Mark William Pearson on microtonal guitarbass and bicycle crank arm xylophone; and Daniel Paul Boucher on amplified drums and electronics. The instrument that anchors the album's sound is also the strangest: circular sawblades, amplified and processed through effects until they ring like gongs. 2 There are no hi-hats or cymbals — Jared Dix at The Quietus points out that the conventional cymbal role is filled entirely by those blades. 3

The band's Bandcamp bio lists their cities as Boston, Boulder, Tucson, and Durham — four people in four places, building objects that most bands could never own and playing shows that need a load-in plan no one else has. Their self-description: "PostPythagorean junk rock >> Indiscriminate scrap metal guitars & drums >> Homesputter electronics." 2

Play Some Music is nine tracks and 38 minutes, recorded in July 2025 at Seizures Palace Recording in Brooklyn, mastered by James Plotkin (whose credits include Sunn O))), Tim Hecker, and Pauline Oliveros). 5 The album closes the 12-year gap since Msg Rcvd (Northern Spy Records, 2012) — their last full-length before a period of quiet.

The record opens with bleeps that Dix describes as "a lost signal finding its way through time, sonar rising from the deep causing ripples of notes, blurring out into long whale tones." 3 Just under half the tracks are instrumental. Where vocals appear, they sit buried in the mix — "mostly softly spoke-sung," in Dix's reading. 3 The cover art, by Sean Micka, is taken from a painting cycle about Mildred Fish Harnack, the American anti-Nazi resistance figure executed in Berlin in 1943. 2

Sanford's explanation of what changed since their last record is specific:

Erick Bradshaw's Bandcamp Daily review describes the result as music that operates through "resonating bell tones, gamelan-like textures, and shifting clashes of sound" — less a rock band than a "monolithic FM synthesizer." 1 The influences Bradshaw reaches for are This Heat and Shellac, not Einstürzende Neubauten — meaning the aggression is controlled, structural, never a wall of pure noise. The Quietus landed on "re-energised, refining their own peculiar sound world. Unique and unpredictable. This sublime, junk-yard, noise-rock transmission." 3

The 16-city run begins June 10 at The Drunken Unicorn in Atlanta and ends June 27 in Iowa City. 2 The routing goes Atlanta → Athens, GA → Winston-Salem → Chapel Hill → Richmond → Washington DC → Baltimore → Philadelphia → Brooklyn → Providence → Medford, MA → Worcester → Buffalo → Indianapolis → Milwaukee → Iowa City. Venues are the kind of rooms Neptune fits: Rhizome DC, Odin's House of Sound, Fête Music Hall, DIY spaces that know what to do with a band hauling amplified sawblades through the door.

Bandcamp (digital from $9 / limited charcoal LP from $25): 2