There is a ferocious, blood-and-iron honesty coursing through Lior Golan’s new EP, “MIDNIGHT TRAINS”, that makes standard heavy rock feel strangely tame. Based in Tel Aviv, the guitarist, composer, and producer crafts music as an urgent survival mechanism, steeped in the grand, rumbling lineage of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Golan channels staggering personal trauma battles with addiction, the lingering ghosts of PTSD from his IDF service, and the catastrophic loss of his sister at the Nova festival directly into amplifiers pushed to their outer thresholds. Alongside Gabriel “Gabe” Lefelman and notable session contributor Niv Hovav, Golan treats raw amplification as medicine for fractured souls.
The collection opens with “CRUEL WIND,” which traps the listener inside the suffocating grind of everyday alienation before blasting its way out. Built on an aggressive, syncopated funk-rock bounce, its sharp chopping rhythms suddenly swell into a towering wall of fuzz, turning personal claustrophobia into pure defiance. From there, the title cut “MIDNIGHT TRAIN” roars to life. It runs on blistering heavy metal momentum, powered by screeching high-register solos and a relentless, pounding undercurrent. There is a wild, wanderlust-fueled desperation to it, matching the stride of someone fleeing a burning room who refuses to look back.
That volatile tension mutates with every track. “Keep Me Hanging On” documents the agony of a stagnant, manipulative relationship, suffocating its urgent vocal arrangement in massive waves of grunge and shoegaze distortion before collapsing into a bruised, lingering fade. In contrast, the stoner-rock grit of “1991” conjures a lawless, sun-scorched wasteland where wandering outlaws fight for survival amid wailing melodic lines. But the record refuses to surrender to bleakness. On “YOU TRIED YOUR BEST (Live) ”, a delicate, echoing sequence of notes patiently transforms into an explosive, cinematic battle cry of determination, eventually fading out on the same gentle phrasing where it began.
Golan pulls his salvation directly from the wreckage, converting sheer anguish into kinetic propulsion. When trauma threatens to hollow everything out, can anything less thunderous than this truly heal the cracks?
