Plague Vendor

When Plague Vendor was about to make their new album By Night, singer Brandon Blaine didn’t exactly know what he wanted it to sound like, but he did know what he wanted it to look like. “A house that’s falling apart but lit up like crazy,” he says now, six months after finishing a record that captures that exact feeling of ruin and regeneration, of charisma and catastrophe and of slashing at the night with nothing but pure electricity. Where 2016’s BLOODSWEAT ended with a to-be-continued moment and Blaine shouting “Romance!” into the silence, By Night ends with a second of feedback and noise. It’s a perfectly spent finish to an adrenaline rush of a record that asks, “What just happened?”