Gold Dime Nerves

Gold Dime is a calling to relentless grit — jolting listeners awake before turning meditative under a hypnotic drone. Raw but composed, GoldDime alternates between an aggression and intimacy, both so sincere, you can’t turn away. It’s transfixing. Live, Andrya Ambro anchors Gold Dime on drums and lead vocals. Every beat is a beckoning to actively listen; and her confident voice no less a beckoning. Performing live as a trio since 2014, opening for the likes of Lower Dens, U.S. Girls and Xiu Xiu, Gold Dime is at last ready to release their hard-won debut album, Nerves, on Fire Talk Records. Gold Dime is the vision of Andrya Ambro. Ambro is best known as one half of the noise rock duo Talk Normal, who released two critically acclaimed albums, Sugarland and Sunshine, and shared the stage with the likes of Sonic Youth, Wire, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Zola Jesus. The dissolution of Talk Normal marked a shift in Ambro’s writing process. Going forward as Gold Dime, her compositions now veer towards an exploratory sound that is distinctly her own. Her drumming is rhythmically-centered, a reflection of driving West African beats crossed with a blunt industrial throbbing, which serve to both underscore and retreat from Classically- influenced orchestrations. Bass lines dance. Guitar riffs in rare tunings purposefully stray from typical rock n’ roll conventions. Their urgent squalls gracefully enter and exit, allowing for a permeable tension throughout each of these tracks. Ambro’s lead vocals are forceful but can seamlessly alter to a deadpan counterweight-- a prominent feature to Gold Dime’s cover of the British spoken-word artist Anne Clark’s “All We Have To Be Thankful For.” And for all of the Gold Dime’s musical density and elaborate noise, the magic that ensues when Ambro’s thunderous vocal style is often foiled by Adam Markiewicz’s (The Dreebs, PC Worship) falsetto voice is palpable. Her lyrics are frequently confrontational (“Quota," "4 Hours”). But they also speak to the ch