Chainsaw Magazine #2

Listen up, you unwashed masses, you speed-freaks, corner-store philosophers, and midnight rail-riders: the ghosts of the American wasteland just crawled out of a swamp in Central Texas, knocked back a warm Coors, and dumped 136 pages of raw, unpasteurized garage-pulp right onto your kitchen table. Chainsaw Magazine #2 ain’t a publication; it’s a living, breathing, high-octane fugitive document—a fugazi, a parody birthed out of Casa Molino Press in Austin that’s more real than whatever glossy, ad-choked drivel they’re peddling at the airport newsstands.

To ingest this rag is to take a direct hit from a cattle prod while reading a dog-eared paperback in a 24-hour laundromat. The editorial line-up curated by Ellis Jones reads like a roll call from an open-door asylum. Right out of the gate, King Khan serves up “How King Khan Got Cramped,” a magnificent, wildly paranoid odyssey through 90s rock ‘n’ roll lore featuring Poison Ivy, Luxe Interior, a stolen backstage pass, an illegal $10,000 Cramps drumhead deal with Henry Rollins in Nashville, and an incendiary, scorched-earth crusade against record-label Zionism. Then Jones himself steps into the ring with Blag Dahlia of The Dwarves to tear the mask off corporate “shock rock” before pivoting into “Stems and Seeds: 25 Years of Hightower”—a massive, five-part epic tracing a wordless, 1000-watt wall of doom from 1990s Mission District squalor to the outer edges of the American interstate. Add in Nate Brooks’ trenchant dispatch on borderlands synth-punk icon N8NOFACE (“Signals in the Dust”), J.L. Heggum’s hilarious Midwestern grocery-store safari (“Mediocre Esoterica”), and Jack Hines’ brutal, heart-wrenching southern-gothic memoir “From Orange To Crimson,” and you realize the writing here doesn’t just inform—it bleeds, twitches, and bites back.

Chainsaw Magazine operates like a hijacked television set flickering in an abandoned alleyway. Peel back the cover and you are met by a bloody, Leatherface-tinged nightmare parodying David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash—sets a chaotic, graphic-heavy baseline that never lets up. Erbo Daradone’s art direction embraces the gutter-pulp heritage of classic zines, fusing raw DIY layout sensibilities with museum-grade photography. Nate Brooks’ “Tent City” photo-essay captures the stark, sun-bleached concrete underbelly of urban displacement with a quiet, devastating clarity, while Joey Fisk’s lens work on Jacob Krajewski’s skateboarding turns urethane and asphalt into pure kinetic poetry. Sprinkled throughout are Edward Hopper parodies, weed-shake canvas fabrications by Dave Fallis, and vintage Thrasher-style layouts that make the physical pages feel heavy, tactile, and coated in motor oil.

Chainsaw #2 stands as a fierce, uncompromising lighthouse standing atop the rocks of sanitized, algorithmic stone. This issue functions as a vital historical archive for the true underground, capturing the exact point where skaterock, garage-punk, noir pulp, and borderland realism collide. By championing the low-fi, closet-recorded darkwave of N8NOFACE, exposing the corporate predatory practices of major music distributors, and honoring the 25-year unsung endurance of a band like Hightower, Chainsaw documents the real-world friction that mainstream culture tries to scrub clean. It reminds us that real art isn’t born in sterile corporate boardrooms or algorithmic feedback loops; it’s forged in cold Mission kitchens, under midnight skatepark floodlights, and in the back of stickerless vans rattling down Interstate 35.

diving into this issue feels like stumbling out of a dim North Beach dive bar at 3:00 AM, getting thrown into the back of a van named “The Slug,” and waking up with a skull full of static and lungs full of dope smoke. The centerpiece excerpt from Ellis Jones’ novel Neon Ruin hits like a direct needle-drop to the prefrontal cortex—a terrifying, lyrical autopsy of our “silicon sanitarium” that lays bare the blue-light lobotomy of the modern screen age before delivering the ultimate speedball of a conclusion. It’s dirty, hilarious, deeply moving, and unapologetically human. Chainsaw Magazine #2 is a masterwork of subterranean journalism—a loud, beautiful, razor-sharp slap in the face to anyone who thought rock ‘n’ roll print was dead. Flip the switch, turn the volume up to eleven, and let the Chainsaw take over.

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Chainsaw Magazine #1

https://a.co/d/0cBf0nbL

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(We are having a technical difficulty with embedded links if you want a one off copy follow the link above and click “see all formats” and it will show you the limited edition covers)