Nearly seven years on from Sunn O)))’s final two albums, the Steve Albini-produced companion items Life Steel and Pyroclasts, the drone steel pioneers’ tenth album presents itself as a return to fundamentals. Eponymously titled and launched on Sub Pop – the label that put out drone steel’s ur-text, Earth’s 1993 debut Earth 2: Particular Low Frequency Model – it strips away Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson’s penchant for collaboration (Scott Walker, Merzbow) and far of the expanded musical palette that got here with it. No church organ, no dulcimer, no vocals, no radical reassembly of their materials courtesy of Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton: nearer Glory Black includes a transient burst of piano, and there are apparently synthesisers someplace within the combine, however for probably the most half, the album appears to deal virtually solely in closely distorted down-tuned guitars and suggestions, the core of Sunn O)))’s sound since they shaped in 1998.
However clearly the notion of a back-to-basics album shouldn’t be confused with that of an understated one. It’s not likely an adjective that matches one thing that lasts the perfect a part of 90 minutes, comes wrapped in a sleeve that includes two Mark Rothko work – by permission of the painter’s property – and options someplace between 130 and 180 tracks of guitar per track. (The latter comes due to a studio process that concerned producer Brad Wooden miking up not simply the duo’s amplifiers however every amplifier’s particular person audio system, and establishing what he known as “the world’s largest stereo array of room mics” to seize ambient textures.) It additionally comes full with sleeve notes from nature author Robert Macfarlane, which variously quote the Greek stoic Epictetus, Walter Benjamin, Nineteenth-century naturalist John Muir, writer Patrick White and indigenous American environmentalist Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Macfarlane is understood for his books in regards to the pure world, and Sunn O))) is an album audibly rooted in a panorama. It was recorded in Bear Creek, a studio set amid acres of pasture and woods in rural Washington: in equity, so was Lionel Richie’s Dancing on the Ceiling, however O’Malley and Anderson clearly took extra apparent inspiration from their environment than Motown’s Mr Simple, repairing to the studio after spending their mornings mountaineering, utilising the atmosphere itself within the recording course of, one thing that feels way more germane to the album’s success than Sunn O)))’s retreat to fundamental instrumentation. Wooden has talked about opening the studio doorways and inserting microphones within the surrounding panorama, which presumably accounts for the truth that, when the primary huge explosion of bass happens, two minutes into opener XXANN, it comes accompanied by the sound of a stream and of birdsong.
You might counsel this can be a minor element – what’s a little bit of chirruping subsequent to the heaving din Sunn O))) make? – however, minor or not, it succeeds in recontextualising their sound, lending the music right here a way of escapism. Actually, what’s on supply in the course of the feedback-strafed Does Anybody Hear Like Venom? or the 18 minutes of Mindrolling is overwhelming sufficient to really feel transportive – after they finish, you actually discover their absence, as for those who’ve been deposited again in actuality. The ambient additions supply a small sonic shift which means the locations it takes you’re feeling extra welcoming than forbidding, pointing up the music’s oddly euphoric impact, which isn’t at all times in regards to the hypnotic qualities of its repetitions, or the catharsis of being consumed by noise. There’s one thing remarkably exhilarating in regards to the fixed ebb and circulate of Butch’s Weapons, on which Sunn O)))’s immense sound often lapses into silence; one thing confounding about the way in which the piano interlude on Glory Black feels extra desolate than the music that surrounds it: there’s a bizarre punch-the-air high quality to the second the detuned guitar sludge reappears.
Maybe a special type of environmental issue additionally impacts on the way in which the album feels: the sense of escapism buoyed by the truth that there are many issues occurring in 2026 that you simply moderately wish to escape from; the truth that that is music it’s a must to undergo – that doesn’t make sense until you give it your full and undivided consideration – rendered extra laudable within the tooth of an period the place streaming platforms appear more and more obsessive about passive consumption, music as a pleasantly vague background wash, a good bore. No matter you make of Sunn O))) – and so they’re the definition of not for everybody – not even their loudest detractor may accuse them of being that.
This week Alexis listened to
Jim Legxacy – idk idk
A lyrical nod to his sister’s passing – additionally addressed on final yr’s Black British Music – suggests idk idk could possibly be a leftover from that report: like that album, its teeming sound underlines that Jim Legxacy is an artist out on his personal.
