Plague Skater III Closes the Project With One Continuous Hour of Music

Plague Skater arrived in 2020 with a self-titled debut, followed a year later by Plague Skater II. After that, Will Schwester kept putting out experimental work on Bandcamp under other names, and the project looked finished. Plague Skater III is out now, and it is the last one under this name.

It is also the biggest. Twenty tracks function as one continuous hour of music, drawing on grunge power chords, shoegaze passages, punk outbursts, static-covered power pop and noise rock, with detours into acoustic balladry and abstract electronics. Schwester plays and samples himself, adding acoustic guitar, auto-tune, keyboards and violin. The penultimate track, “Enter The Goo Vat,” runs seventeen minutes.

In the Bandcamp liner notes, he writes that the record “took way too long to make,” and that he finished it with barely a day to spare before leaving on tour with another band. He calls the result both a joke and dead serious, and signs off by naming it “my greatest failure and my goddamn masterpiece.”

The ending was intended. Schwester says he always meant this to be the final Plague Skater album. What stands out is the scale of the exit: instead of letting the project fade out, he closed it with an hour of music that moves through genres rather than settling into any one of them.