A Trail of Two Cities: Orbit Gate & Vault - NEW VEGAS GANGSTER SLAM (Split Album Review) Released: 6/1/26

 

There's a particular kind of album that announces itself before you even press play. New Vegas Gangster Slam is one of them. The title alone sets the coordinates: somewhere between desert menace and underground brutality, the split between Orbital Gate and Vault is less a listening experience than a territorial claim. It's the kind of release that finds its audience through word of mouth in the darker corners of the internet, passed around among people who already know, who already get it. For everyone else, consider this your introduction. Before diving in, it's worth knowing who you're dealing with. Orbital Gate is the solo project of Eva Van Dyne, the one woman handling every instrument, every riff, every crushing arrangement from Cary, Illinois. There's something almost philosophically correct about slamming brutal death metal emerging from the suburban Midwest. The mundanity of the geography only amplifies the cosmic absurdity of the sound, the contrast between the quiet streets above and the intergalactic punishment being assembled below. Van Dyne operates without a committee, without compromise, and the results reflect that singular focus completely. Every decision on Orbital Gate's three tracks is deliberate, purposeful, and entirely hers.


Vault, on the other hand, is a transatlantic slamgrind operation built around a shared and very specific obsession: the Fallout universe. Louis handles vocals while Azerate Nakamura constructs everything else around him, the two collaborating across Austria and the United States to produce something that sounds as if it were recorded inside an irradiated bunker with no intention of ever coming out. The distance between them never registers as a weakness; if anything, the fragmented, long-range nature of their collaboration feeds directly into the aesthetic. Fallout's themes of isolation, societal collapse, and bodily mutation map onto slamgrind's fixation on grotesque physicality with an almost uncomfortable neatness. Vault leans into that overlap with total conviction. Two very different projects, then, but as this split demonstrates, they share enough brutalist DNA to make the pairing feel deliberate rather than accidental.

Orbital Gate opens proceedings and wastes no time establishing its lane. "3 Billi On My Wrist" arrives with chest-out confidence, built on cold, spacious production that treats silence as a weapon. Van Dyne understands that what you leave out of a brutal death metal track can hit just as hard as what you put in, and the negative space here is doing serious structural work. The riffs land with that particular satisfying weight that only comes from someone who genuinely loves the genre rather than simply executing it. It's a strong opener that's self-assured without being showy, menacing without telegraphing its punches. "Boulder City Beatdown" shifts the mood into something more methodical and confrontational. The tempo is slower, the atmosphere thicker, a low-rolling threat that sounds like a debt being collected mile by mile down the I-11 through the Nevada desert. There's a cinematic quality to it that serves Orbital Gate well throughout their half of the record and the sense that these songs exist inside a larger world, one with geography and stakes and consequences. The track doesn't rush toward its conclusion. It arrives on its own terms.

The trio closes with "There Stands the Gooncave," which is frankly one of the more humorous track titles in recent memory, and the song earns every syllable of it. Murky, cavernous, and oddly triumphant, it functions as both a mission statement and a victory lap simultaneously. Van Dyne sticks the landing. Orbital Gate's half is cohesive and self-assured, sketching a vivid corner of a sun-scorched underworld with the confidence of someone who has been building this world in their head for a long time and is only now letting the rest of us see it. Then Vault takes the wheel and drives it off a cliff into a gorge filled with nuclear waste. Where Orbital Gate is calculated, Vault is corrosive. "Isolation-Induced Psychosis" featuring Big Chef opens their side with frayed nerves and fractured cadences, the production deliberately unstable beneath vocals that sound like they were recorded through a cracked wall in a room that hasn't seen sunlight in decades. The Fallout theming isn't window dressing here; it's structural. The claustrophobia is real, the paranoia is load-bearing, and Big Chef's contribution pushes the track into genuinely uncomfortable territory. It's an excellent scene-setter for what follows.

"Cleansed By Atomic Fire" featuring Divinite Hive leans fully into the apocalyptic imagery the album title teases. It's the most expansive track on the record, sprawling and almost ritualistic in its pacing, Nakamura's instrumentation building a landscape that feels genuinely irradiated and warm in all the wrong ways, glowing faintly with something dangerous. Divinite Hive adds a layer of texture that elevates the track above pure brutality into something with genuine atmosphere. Of everything on this split, it's the piece that lingers longest after the album ends. Closer "Troglodyte Disembowelment" featuring Parasitic Infection commits fully and gleefully to the grotesque, and the combination of all three collaborators makes it the most unhinged three minutes on offer here. It's a strong closing statement like a door being slammed rather than closed, assuming your stomach is up for the journey.

As a split, the sequencing works better than expected. The two halves complement rather than clash, Orbital Gate's relative composure making Vault's chaos feel earned rather than gratuitous. The Las Vegas framing holds it together thematically: the glittering surface on one side, the rot festering underneath on the other. The New Vegas of Fallout and the New Vegas of Orbital Gate's gangster mythology turn out to occupy the same imaginative space more naturally than anyone had a right to expect. New Vegas Gangster Slam isn't trying to convert the uninitiated, and it doesn't need to. It knows its audience, respects them, and delivers without flinching. 

For fans of underground brutality with genuine vision behind it, this split is exactly what it promises to be and then a little more. Go stream it in its entirety now, courtesy of Slam Worldwide: 

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