5 hours ago
9
Nearly seven years on from Sunn O)))’s last two albums, the Steve Albini-produced companion pieces Life Metal and Pyroclasts, the drone metal pioneers’ 10th album presents itself as a return to basics. Eponymously titled and released on Sub Pop – the label that put out drone metal’s ur-text, Earth’s 1993 debut Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version – it strips away Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s penchant for collaboration (Scott Walker, Merzbow) and much of the expanded musical palette that came with it. No church organ, no dulcimer, no vocals, no radical reassembly of their material courtesy of Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton: closer Glory Black features a brief burst of piano, and there are apparently synthesisers somewhere in the mix, but for the most part, the album seems to deal almost exclusively in heavily distorted down-tuned guitars and feedback, the core of Sunn O)))’s sound since they formed in 1998.
But clearly the notion of a back-to-basics album should not be confused with that of an understated one. It’s not really an adjective that fits something that lasts the best part of 90 minutes, comes wrapped in a sleeve featuring two Mark Rothko paintings – by permission of the painter’s estate – and features somewhere between 130 and 180 tracks of guitar per song. (The latter comes thanks to a studio procedure that involved producer Brad Wood miking up not just the duo’s amplifiers but each amplifier’s individual speakers, and setting up what he called “the world’s largest stereo array of room mics” to capture ambient textures.) It also comes complete with sleeve notes from nature writer Robert Macfarlane, which variously quote the Greek stoic Epictetus, Walter Benjamin, 19th-century naturalist John Muir, author Patrick White and indigenous American environmentalist Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Macfarlane is known for his books about the natural world, and Sunn O))) is an album audibly rooted in a landscape. It was recorded in Bear Creek, a studio set amid acres of pasture and woods in rural Washington: in fairness, so was Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling, but O’Malley and Anderson clearly took more obvious inspiration from their surroundings than Motown’s Mr Easy, repairing to the studio after spending their mornings hiking, utilising the environment itself in the recording process, something that feels far more germane to the album’s success than Sunn O)))’s retreat to basic instrumentation. Wood has talked about opening the studio doors and placing microphones in the surrounding landscape, which presumably accounts for the fact that, when the first big explosion of bass occurs, two minutes into opener XXANN, it comes accompanied by the sound of a stream and of birdsong.
You could suggest this is a minor detail – what’s a bit of chirruping next to the heaving din Sunn O))) make? – but, minor or not, it succeeds in recontextualising their sound, lending the music here a sense of escapism. Certainly, what’s on offer during the feedback-strafed Does Anyone Hear Like Venom? or the 18 minutes of Mindrolling is overwhelming enough to feel transportive – when they end, you really notice their absence, as if you’ve been deposited back in reality. The ambient additions offer a small sonic shift that means the places it takes you feel more welcoming than forbidding, pointing up the music’s oddly euphoric effect, which isn’t always about the hypnotic qualities of its repetitions, or the catharsis of being consumed by noise. There’s something remarkably exhilarating about the constant ebb and flow of Butch’s Guns, on which Sunn O)))’s immense sound occasionally lapses into silence; something confounding about the way the piano interlude on Glory Black feels more desolate than the music that surrounds it: there’s a weird punch-the-air quality to the moment the detuned guitar sludge reappears.
Perhaps a different kind of environmental factor also impacts on the way the album feels: the sense of escapism buoyed by the fact that there are plenty of things going on in 2026 that you reasonably want to escape from; the fact that this is music you have to submit to – that doesn’t make sense unless you give it your full and undivided attention – rendered more laudable in the teeth of an era where streaming platforms seem increasingly obsessed with passive consumption, music as a pleasantly indistinct background wash, a nice bore. Whatever you make of Sunn O))) – and they’re the definition of not for everyone – not even their loudest detractor could accuse them of being that.
This week Alexis listened to
Jim Legxacy – idk idk
A lyrical nod to his sister’s passing – also addressed on last year’s Black British Music – suggests idk idk could be a leftover from that record: like that album, its teeming sound underlines that Jim Legxacy is an artist out on his own.
