Aural Aggravation

Adelaide sludge merchants Sundowner are back, and things haven’t gotten any prettier.

Three years after Lysergic Ritual dragged listeners through a feedback-soaked wasteland of nihilism and decay, the Australian quartet have announced their third full-length, Cesspool, due out October 15 via Melbourne’s Disdain Records.

The band are offering the first taste of the album with ‘Intoxication Blues’, a filthy, swaggering slab of NOLA-inspired sludge accompanied by a brand-new visualizer.

Built around poisoned blues riffs, suffocating grooves, walls of feedback and a thick layer of distortion, ‘Intoxication Blues’ provides an appropriately nasty introduction to an album designed to soundtrack a world going up in flames.

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Cesspool sees Sundowner take the caustic, slow-burning sludge that has defined them since their 2021 debut Guns, Knives and Tyre Irons and push it into even more punishing territory across ten new tracks.

The band explain: “Cesspool continues on with our brand of sludge, further melding influences from the classic ’90s pioneers of the genre through our own lens out of Adelaide, South Australia.”

For Sundowner, that lineage has always been clear. The poisoned blues of Eyehategod, the ugliness of Iron Monkey and Buzzov-en, and the smoke-filled grooves of Weedeater remain embedded in their DNA. But Cesspool isn’t interested in simply recreating the past. Instead, those influences are fed through Sundowner’s own distinctly Australian strain of hostility.

The album also sees Sundowner reunite with the production team behind Lysergic Ritual. After handling virtually everything themselves during the band’s early years, Sundowner brought Jason Fuller of Goatsound Studios into the fold to mix their second album, with Dav Byrne of Iridium Audio handling mastering.

“We went with the same production team as our last album, but pushed everything further for a more punishing and abrasive sound,” says the band.

Across its ten tracks, Cesspool doubles down on everything Sundowner do best: filthy blues, crushing grooves, abrasive riffs and pure sludge-soaked hostility. It’s heavier, nastier and more punishing, without straying from the band’s uncompromising roots.