p until now, a marriage between fellow Brooklyn bands Ex Models and Oneida might have seemed mismatched. While the former has favored short, spastic bursts of razor-wire guitars, oddly-timed rhythms, and vocals that recall Mark Mothersbaugh at his most frenzied, the latter has perfected a blend of sprawling psych-rock and mechanistic Kraut-rock grooves. But with Chrome Panthers, featuring Oneida’s Kid Millions on drums, Ex Models have found a way to distill all of these elements into something altogether new and fierce.

After the near-dissolution of their band last year, guitarists Shahin Motia and Zach Lehrhoff recruited Kid Millions to help them reinvent and streamline their sound. Now, instead of surprising with abrupt changes, the emphasis is on repetition. Songs build from interlocking stabs of guitar squall, often sounding like distorted dial tones, working into a lather over Kid’s furious, robotic pummeling. For a band whose previous album, 2003’s Zoo Psychology, sped through fifteen songs in twenty-two minutes, it’s almost shocking to see track lengths reaching the six-minute mark. Still, in no way are the new songs self-indulgent or boring. The energy once so nervously compressed is now allowed to flower over long stretches, making for their most fevered and intense recordings yet. This expansion comes to its logical climax on the last track, “Chrome Hearts,” which sounds like a resurrected Keith Moon playing drums for Lightning Bolt.

Motia and Lehrhoff call their new sound “fundustrial,” which makes sense given the harsh guitar tones and childish sense of humor in song titles like, “That’s Funny I Don’t Feel Like a Shithead.” But to me this sounds more like the meeting point of no wave’s atonal screech and the tranced lock-groove rhythms of groups like Can and Neu, which might sound studied or pretentious if it didn’t pulverize. It’s a shame the Ex Models are so often overlooked amidst the increasingly hype-driven New York scene. Touring as a two-piece, with Millions’ drums coming from tape loops controlled by footswitches, Ex Models are as loud and relentless as ever. They just might be the first band since Big Black to completely succeed in this context. Like the more recent work of Liars, Ex Models have discovered the hypnotic power of drone and repetition and incorporated it into their sound. But while broadening their influences, they’ve also managed to tighten their focus, which is no small feat.