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Consumables are a fierce NYC-based art punk quartet with a defiant philosophical edge. Their debut album, Infinite Games, co-written and produced by Bodega’s Ben Hozie, cuts to the heart of contemporary alienation by grappling with the desperate quest for control in a world drowning in chaos and unpredictability. The band is made up of Kyle Crew (vocals, guitar), Miles Fox (vocals, bass, synth), Hector Guillen (drums), and Dylan Joyce (guitar).
Consumables have made a name for themselves with their explosive live performances around NYC. Guitarist Kyle Crew is tall, confident, and observant, like a watchtower atop a stage where everyone and everything is moving. This commanding presence translates to the album’s rollicking opening track, “Keys to the Cell,” a reflection on Crew’s six month incarceration in an Arkansas jail on pot charges. The track kicks off the album on a raw and optimistic note, revelling in possibilities and new horizons. It lays down the aesthetic gauntlet for what’s to come: “screaming sirens came and went / everything’s a game of chance.”
The band’s debut album is conceptually inspired by the book Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse, which explores the difference between the two concepts. Finite games have boundaries, rules, and clear winners and losers. Infinite games have no winner; the only goal is to continue the play. “So much unnecessary suffering happens when a person plays a finite game in an infinite game scenario,” explains Crew. This theme surfaces often throughout the album’s twelve tracks, from exploring tensions between technology, selfhood, and authenticity on the post-punk standout “Great Design” and the drama of keeping a romantic relationship alive on slacker-tinged “Ten Toes Down”.
Consumables’ rhythm section is filled by drummer Hector Guillen, who developed his craft early in life playing in prog bands in his native Panama, and bassist Miles Fox, whose synth-pop anthems are amongst the album’s standout cuts – sequenced here as perfect foils to Crew’s jittery hook-centric punk sensibilities. Infinite Games is a bass-forward album; its pulse is impossible to ignore. Listen to Guillen and Fox’s seasoned interplay on “Emotional Speedball,” a meditation on the highs and lows of lust made manifest through a rhythmic core weaving through heavy traffic. Highlights “Dry Rot” and “Messages” surge with the band’s push and pull of rhythmic elasticity. In the latter, Fox meditates on a world of ubiquitous signalling systems wherein – somehow – nothing gets through. In a lyrical highlight of the album, he ponders our “complex motivations, not motivated.”
The album culminates in the hazy eponymous cut, “Infinite Games” where the band takes flight with a euphoric singalong crescendo that evokes the peak of a psychedelic experience: “I feel limitless / this is what freedom is.” This musical openness expresses the boundless feeling of a relationship viewed through an infinite mindset. There is an immediacy attached to Crew’s question of the purpose of it all: “What kind of creature am I? I’ve got to figure it out.” This is an album about enlightenment at a time when the clock is ticking.
Infinite Games is out March 7, 2025 via We Are Time (North America) and Fierce Panda (UK/EU). The album was produced and co-written by Ben Hozie of BODEGA, engineered, mixed by Adam Sachs, and mastered by Mikey Young.
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