{"id":360557,"date":"2026-04-02T16:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T16:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/360557\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T16:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T16:48:08","slug":"sunn-o-sunn-o-review-a-seismic-return-to-drone-metals-elemental-core-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/360557\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunn O))): Sunn O))) review \u2013 a seismic return to drone metal\u2019s elemental core | Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly seven years on from Sunn O)))\u2019s last two albums, the Steve Albini-produced companion pieces Life Metal<\/a> and Pyroclasts, the drone metal pioneers\u2019 10th album presents itself as a return to basics. Eponymously titled and released on Sub Pop \u2013 the label that put out drone metal\u2019s ur-text, Earth\u2019s 1993 debut Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version \u2013 it strips away Stephen O\u2019Malley and Greg Anderson\u2019s 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\u2019s 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)))\u2019s sound since they formed in 1998.<\/p>\n

The artwork for Sunn O))). <\/p>\n

But clearly the notion of a back-to-basics album should not be confused with that of an understated one. It\u2019s 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 \u2013 by permission of the painter\u2019s estate \u2013 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\u2019s amplifiers but each amplifier\u2019s individual speakers, and setting up what he called \u201cthe world\u2019s largest stereo array of room mics\u201d to capture ambient textures.) It also comes complete with sleeve notes from nature writer Robert Macfarlane<\/a>, which variously quote the Greek stoic Epictetus, Walter Benjamin, 19th-century naturalist John Muir, author Patrick White and indigenous American environmentalist Robin Wall Kimmerer.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Dancing on the Ceiling, but O\u2019Malley and Anderson clearly took more obvious inspiration from their surroundings than Motown\u2019s 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\u2019s success than Sunn O)))\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Sunn O))): Glory Black \u2013 video<\/p>\n

You could suggest this is a minor detail \u2013 what\u2019s a bit of chirruping next to the heaving din Sunn O))) make? \u2013 but, minor or not, it succeeds in recontextualising their sound, lending the music here a sense of escapism. Certainly, what\u2019s on offer during the feedback-strafed Does Anyone Hear Like Venom? or the 18 minutes of Mindrolling is overwhelming enough to feel transportive \u2013 when they end, you really notice their absence, as if you\u2019ve 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\u2019s oddly euphoric effect, which isn\u2019t always about the hypnotic qualities of its repetitions, or the catharsis of being consumed by noise. There\u2019s something remarkably exhilarating about the constant ebb and flow of Butch\u2019s Guns, on which Sunn O)))\u2019s 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\u2019s a weird punch-the-air quality to the moment the detuned guitar sludge reappears.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 that doesn\u2019t make sense unless you give it your full and undivided attention \u2013 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))) \u2013 and they\u2019re the definition of not for everyone \u2013 not even their loudest detractor could accuse them of being that.<\/p>\n

This week Alexis listened to<\/p>\n

Jim Legxacy \u2013 idk idk
A lyrical nod to his sister\u2019s passing \u2013 also addressed on last year\u2019s Black British Music \u2013 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly seven years on from Sunn O)))\u2019s last two albums, the Steve Albini-produced companion pieces Life Metal and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-360557","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}