Danish rock quartet Crushing releases new EP 'voice chat'

Following a spring with two singles and a succession of explosive live shows, among those on SPOT Festival in Denmark, the Aarhus, Denmark-based rock band Crushing releases their new EP voice chat today May 29th via Commotion. As exemplified on the EP, Crushing disregards perfection and optimization, and instead embraces an intense process with a deliberate minimum of doubt and self-reflection, allowing ideas to flow freely and quickly transforming them into music, lyrics, and visual expressions.

Across six songs, the listener is met with the band’s defiant yet unpretentious expression, where elements of Lou Reed swagger, midwest emo, post-rock, no wave, and ’90s guitar rock wrap layers of sound around lyrical depictions of overwhelm, powerlessness, and ecstasy in an accelerating, ever-changing existence. With their music, Crushing seeks to engage with the state of the world, with all its absurdities — not least technology and the flood of information that increasingly surrounds and engulfs us - they state:

“We do something about the overwhelm instead of being paralyzed by it. That’s our way of processing it. To step out of the stream of bullshit and relate to our immediate surroundings, to be affected by the people around us. The world is burning one way today and another tomorrow, and we try to crystallize a feeling of how things are for us right now. We have to let the process move quickly, because the world is moving so fast.

Crushing has just been announced for Øya Tuesday as warm-up for Øya festival on August 11th at John Dee in Oslo, Norway. More shows will be announced in the time to come.

Crushing is a relatively new constellation consisting of a group of friends who have worked across various projects and communities, with the creative environment in Sydhavnen in Aarhus as a focal point. After working on other projects with detailed productions, the musicians in Crushing felt a need to move away from precision and instead create immediate, imperfect guitar rock. This resulted in the album Residual Material (2025), which was recorded in a week and followed by their first concerts.

With the work on the new EP ‘voice chat’, Crushing became a band. In line with the band’s ethos, the guiding principle of the process was: “One rehearsal, one song, doubt nothing, go all in.” Over an intense period of about a month, the songs were written and the DNA of the material mapped out. In the writing process, the band left room for chance during the subsequent recordings, which took place over five days in Sydhavnen, Aarhus, where the songs were recorded live to capture the energy arising between the musicians.

Crushing’s songs revolve around being crushed — beneath something heavy and greater than oneself. Being overwhelmed, by both ecstasy, emptiness and powerlessness. The feeling of being controlled or influenced by something external, something whose scope cannot be perceived or understood — an absurd, god-like or meta-technological force — is a constant presence in the band’s lyrics.

'voice chat' track list:

1. clothes 2 deaf

2. 2much2real

3. walk ur dog

4. house

5. family

6. sleeper agent