Posts Tagged ‘EP Review’

Tiny Magnetic Pets – Astralux EP

Posted: 25 August 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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21st August 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

For their latest EP release, prolific Irish electronic / synthwave outfit Tiny Magnetic Pets give us a remix of ‘Lost My Guiding Light’, which first appeared on their second album, way back in 2017. It’s a reasonable amount of time to leave before revisiting a song, and as Sean Quinn (synths, guitar & vocals) explains, “When we play live we like to do different versions from the records. Last year, we were asked to play a dance music festival in Dublin, so we re-arranged the opening track from our second album Deluxe/Debris for an EDM audience, and it has now become the opening tune to our live shows,” going on to add “We re-recorded this new version in 2026 and we feel it is significantly different from the original to warrant its own release and slight re-title: ‘Lost My Guiding Light (Again)’ – a wee nod to Bowie’s John I’m Only Dancing (Again).”

It’s hard to argue that it’s substantially different from the original, not to mention the fact it’s two and a half minutes longer. The rippling, drifting ambient intro is extended out on this new version, and the beats – beefier, more driving – paired with a more prominent cyclical synth motif that owes much to late 90s dance – change the overall feel more than anything, and while the extended mid-section twinkles and shimmers, it doesn’t haver the same ethereal shimmer as the original. This is the trade, and a matter of preference, really: understated textural detail, or a more expansive, sturdier-sounding rendition.

It’s backed with not one, but two remixes of ‘Low Places’ courtesy of Dakeyne. The original was released just last year, as the lead track on the Harmonious Grey EP. A collision of dark disco and electropop, it boasts a thick, rumbling bass sand bops along nicely. Not so much the first of the Dakenye remixes, which sees a hard, industrial-strength beat dominate an extremely busy arrangement crammed with niggling repetitions. It’s clearly more club-orientated, but do such clubs even exist nowadays? Still, I’d take this over the Dakenye Acid Dub mix, which – being a dub – strips out most of the vocals and everything else in favour of the monotonous kick drum, wibbling bass, and occasional incidentals. Maybe Acid Dubs require actual acid rather than a couple of cans of West Coast IPA. Ultimately, this feels like something of a stop-gap release.

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The Sunken Land – sunstead

Posted: 8 August 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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19th July 2026

The Sunken Land – the musical vehicle for David Martin, York-based solo purveyor of ‘bedsit doomgaze’ – makes a fairly swift follow-up to The Woods at Dusk three-track EP, released in May, with a more expansive five tracker in the form of ‘sunstead’. There are no notes beyond the credits, meaning the music is left – or allowed – to speak for itself.

‘horizon fires’ makes for a strong start, and continues Martin’s assimilation of current and local geography events and events by way of inspiration. There have been countless wildfires around the UK in the last couple of months, many of which have failed to make national or even regional news. One can assume that this is largely on account that their number has made reporting impossible, meaning that only significant fires in national parks or those close to nuclear plants have warranted that level of coverage. But in and around York, there have been fires lit – intentionally – on an almost daily basis, in playparks and on local moorland, with one potentially endangering cattle and threatening to make its way toward a branch of Lidl to the south-west of the city. The entire country – and, indeed, most of mainland Europe, too – is a tinderbox, gripped by drought during one of – if not the –most prolonged hot / dry spells since records began. And people – mostly teens – are starting fires for fun. It’s a terrifying and bewildering state of affairs, and seeing smoke on the horizon is disconcerting. This first track layers soaring post-rock lead guitar lines over thick, distorted chords. At times – again – reminiscent of latter-day Earth, it’s a composition which explores tonal and textural contrasts, and builds tension as it does so.

‘tupla vs. egregore’ plunges straight into the heavy drone territory, the mesh of distortion and slow pace reminiscent to some extent of Sunn O))), but with strolling bass and some extended soloing that feel more as if it belongs in the domain of prog, it combines a host of disparate elements in quite unexpected ways – almost as unexpected as the abrupt ending. At just over fine minutes long, it’s by no means a short piece, but the impression is that it would have worked quite nicely extending over a full stretch of twenty minutes or so. The same is true of the six-minute title track, which swoops and soars and is all the while driven by a serrated drone of overdriven chords which hang for an eternity.

‘swedish death cleaning’ springs quite the surprise with a thudding riff that screams Mötörhead, which is in turn overlayed with the most flamboyant fretwork we’ve yet heard from The Sunken Land. It’s certainly the most raucous, and full-on rock piece in his catalogue, and unexpected as it is, it’s also well executed, and adheres to his principles of lo-fi recording and an absence of percussion, meaning it doesn’t feel entirely incongruous.

Across the EPs five cuts, sunstead demonstrates a marked expansion of The Sunken Land’s sound, and if the last of these, ‘noctilucence’ returns to more familiar territory, the overall feel of this set is one of greater confidence, and a determination to explore wider territory, and as such, marks the fulfilment of the promise of the works which preceded it. Given his rate of output – and evolution – the next six months could prove to be very interesting indeed.

AA

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Amps Kill – Avulse EP

Posted: 25 July 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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23rd July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

With Amps Kill’s Avulse EP, we’re in dark ambient territory here, with the emphasis on the dark, at least sonically. In terms of intent and narrative arc, it’s a little more nuanced in hue.

As the accompanying notes outline, ‘Without lyrics, Avulse guides the listener through a story. The track titles on the EP provide some context to the emotional inspiration behind the music… Avulse explores the idea of removing aspects of the self or of one’s life that are holding one back from growing and moving forward just as lizards, spiders, and insects need to shed their skin to grow. It’s a process that is often quite painful but always for the better. That pain is the core of Avulse’.

The EP’s title certainly makes sense in this context, the dictionary definition being ‘to pull or tear something away, especially a part of the body as a result of an accident or surgery’. And so it is that Amps Kill delivers something of a performative purging over the course of the EP’s five compositions.

As is the method when it comes to EP releases in recent years, the four of the five tracks on Avulse have been released individually as singles. I’m still not entirely clear on the wisdom of this approach to promotion: there’s building interest through advance singles, and then there’s emptying the tank. But then I spent a long time being accustomed to one or two singles in advance of an album’s release, and one or two more after to maintain its profile and to extend its trailing sales. Now, everything is up-front – a consequence surely being that anticipation for an EP is diminished because there’s less – if any – new material to look forward to. But I’m 50 and came to music in an era of physical releases and singles chart shows on the TV and radio, and I’m clearly get to grasp the benefits of the new way.

The first four tracks, all released as singles do, it has to be said, work better in succession than as standalone pieces. ‘Slough’, landing with a dense, hard, serrated-edged billow of noise that crashes in like a tidal wave, is heavy and oppressive. There are softer sounds beneath, but overall, it forges a thick, oppressive atmosphere, and ‘Chronophage’ plunges deeper. The title references the Corpus Clock, also known as the Grasshopper Clock, outside the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, a clock with no hands or numerals and guarded by a metal grasshopper or locust. Amidst scrapes and hums of feedback, electronic insectoid skitterings create texture on the track, creating a scratchy, uncomfortable tension, and ‘Husk’ brings more heavy, sonorous drones and cracking distortion at the edges of dense surges of sound. It’s not entirely ambient, as there are thick, booming beats which land like detonations, and the atmosphere is tense, akin to the sound of low-flying planes and crashes and splashes like shattering metal rupture all about. It’s pretty intense, and comfortable it is not.

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‘Basilisk’ brings more of the same, in essence, but the thunderous beats are brought to the fore, amidst the flutter of flapping, like the sound of a thousand bats fleeing a bottomless cave. And so there is a clear sense of progression here: dark ambience transitions to throbbing industrial – in the more traditional sense, tracing a lineage to Throbbing Gristle, Coil.

Arriving at the last piece, the only one previously unreleased, there is a significant shift in tone. As Amps Kill intimates, “‘Des Pas Sur Les Cendres’ completes the idea of the group and ties all of them together. That track takes all of its musical thematic material from a piano work by Claude Debussy called ‘Des pas sur la neige’ and expands or explores it’. It sure as hell doesn’t sound like Debussy, but it very much does feel like a composition which brings the EP to a fitting close – altogether more subdued, softer, more delicate, it’s five and a half minutes of mellow ambience, albeit with a few serrated edges – which, while dark, hints at some vague sense of hope, and the sense that once the avulsion is complete, there is the potential to grow anew.

AA

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Craic Killers – Who Said I Was…

Posted: 15 July 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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12th July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Anyone who says politics should be kept out of music is talking bollocks. An integral part of musical history is the music of protest, and of music which speaks of the times. While not necessarily protest-based, many dark moments of history are captured within traditional folk songs – long before the 60s gave us a whole new model for folk music as a vehicle for protest. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Cat Stevens are just the first few names which come to mind as artists who picked up an acoustic guitar and used it to voice their anti-war sentiments, and it’s a mantel that’s been carried by many since, perhaps most prominently by Billy Bragg.

The arrival of punk brought a different kind of dissenting voice – one that was angry, nihilistic, and wasn’t so much anti-war as anti-everything, seeking to smash the system and stick it to the man. It shat the establishment up for a while, too, because it was brash, menacing, and felt violent, dangerous. This was Thatcher’s Britain: unemployment was up, there were strikes galore and discontent was more than rife. Of course, the major labels saw pound signs and signed punk bands left right and centre and before long, many acts were defanged by the wheels of capitalism in motion. And so the true punks stuck to, or remained resolutely, DIY, and while punk’s undergone a host of mutations since 1977, it still has both the sound and the vibe – particularly in the DIY scene – that positively yells ‘anti-establishment’. And this is, essentially, Craic Killers in a nutshell. The London-based Irish duo take certain cues from Kneecap, who, while having drawn heat from ‘the establishment’ are widely lauded for being not only outspoken, but sticking to their (metaphorical) guns in the face of litigation and more.

Before we get to the music, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the question of what constitutes ‘the establishment’ these days. Farage will tell you he and Reform and seeking to unsettle the status quo, to challenge the establishment and that they represent the man in the street who is fed up with not being represented by politicians in parliament. Bankrolled by tax-evading millionaires and billionaires whose funds reside off shore and who seek to siphon off even more wealth for their own personal gain, this is patent bullshit, and making those men on the street angry because they’ve been tricked to believe it’s the fault of immigrants that they’re poor and local services are shit is a massive con. The establishment does not exist to serve the regular worker. The establishment’s ethos is built on the foundations of the worst of capitalism, and this is why the establishment – both here in the UK, and particularly across the pond – is so hell-bent on dismissing any ideology that’s even remotely left (by which I mean, they hate welfare of any kind, particularly free healthcare, because ultimately, they don’t believe the poor deserve to live), and why they’re so desperate to crush dissent. It’s not because they believe protesters are terrorists, but because they hate to be exposed, and also can’t stand to see their absolute power and total authority challenged. There is much wrong with all of this, and more.

And Craic Killers are calling it out. All of it. As they tell it, ‘The new work goes in on the Epstein elite, MAGA bootlickers and major government failures such as the PSNI & TFL. Who Said I Was… matches the first EP’s intensity and themes of world collapse with a more refined sound.

It’s hard to argue any of that, really. Released last October, Who TF is Craic Killers? was a full-throttle blast of super-lo fi electropunk fury. Part of its appeal was the lack of production, rendering it the very quintessence of DIY. Cleaning up the sound is by no means selling out, especially when Who Said I Was… still sounds like it was recorded in a 4-track app on a smart phone. They rip into Andrew Tate and the ‘manosphere’, blast ICE, and tackle issues closer to home: certainly, the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) and their actions aren’t widely reported further afield, but as the sole note which accompanied the single release simply stated ‘All Peelers Are Bastards (and pedos)’. Trust in police is at a low eight now, for so many reasons, and the recent appearance of ‘ACAB’ graffitied under the bridge which carries the A64 over the River Ouse near where I live (alongside ‘Fuck Nazis’) is telling of the mood, I feel.

With the exception of ‘GIMMIE’ (released as a single in June), none of the six songs run over three minutes – but all of them are delivered with a ragged, riotous energy. By which I mean these guys are absolutely fucking fearless, and relentless in their intensity. ‘TFL’ may be slower and lower, but it’s dingy and abrasive, the vocals somewhere between hardcore punky shouting and really aggro rapping, while the closer, ‘Public Relations’ is unexpectedly catchy, but still as scuzzy as fuck.

It’s worth spending some time and a few listens to pick out the lyrics, but Who Said I Was… hits like a back-and-forth slap round the chops from the very first bar and keeps it going to the end. This is precisely what punk is about: impact, going in hard, no compromise. They don’t come much more punk than Craic Killers.

AA

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Picastro – Double On Time

Posted: 18 June 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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12th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Picastro may not have the swiftest workrate – it’s been three years since their last release, the single ‘Earthseed’ / ‘Tacitus’ and four and a half since their EP of cover versions, I’ve Never Met a Stranger. But they’ve maintained a steady flow for the best part of three decades now, evolving through manifold permutations and carving time out for creative endeavours among the usual obstacles which face most adults, including, but no limited to, day-jobs and simply life itself.

At their (slow) core has always been Liz Hysen, vocalist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist, and this time around she’s joined by longstanding contributor Tim Condon (synth, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, harmonium, piano) and Alex Fournier (double bass). Together, they’ve created a set of songs which – recorded primarily in their homes – conjures a weirdy, warping, lo-fi ethereality. ‘Fell the Family Tree’, centred around a stuttering discordant piano loop, laced with tremulous strings, is stark and revels in the perversely awkward nature of the way in which the elements rub against one another. ‘Remember who you are my son,’ Hysen croons, her meandering vocal swerving around a melody rather than holding one, in a way that’s haunting, the way sing-song tunes sung off-key in thrillers and horror movies are employed as a way of alluding to emotional disturbance, or being psychologically unsettled. I’m not actually sure it happens so much in real life, but the effect is unnerving.

‘Chance Striker’ is droney and foggy, and drags a deep weight, low and slow, and in this context, the skipping lightness of ‘Ring Description’, which clocks in at exactly just two minutes sounds and feels like a different band entirely. With a soaring vocal delivery which has a certain jazziness to it, the pulsing keyboards almost lean into a kind of groove. To describe it as ‘fun’ might be a bit of a stretch, but these things are relative, and it happens to land bang in the middle of an EP that, while moving, emotionally powerful, and inventive, is by no means designed with entertainment in mind.

Pairing acoustic guitar with strings and extraneous clanking and noise, ‘Move Fast, Break’ is a mournful folk song at its heart – but it’s a challenging listen, and not only because all the elements appear to be battling against one another to play different tunes. Hysen sounds emotionally hollowed out, before dragging herself through the moody piano murk of ‘Believer End’ with a tense, breathy performance.

Nothing about Double On Time is comfortable or easy: it leaves you feeling somewhat stricken – somewhat lost for words, and short on breath. It may be superficially simple in its instrumental arrangements, but the extent to which Picastro explore dissonant tunings and atonality is affecting. It feels wrong. And it’s this wrongness which is very much its strength, in that is hauls the listener from whatever comfort zone they might be lounging in, and into a space that forces them to look directly at scenes they might find hard to process. In doing so, Picastro give us true art.

AA

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Trauma Party – Because You’ve Been Good

Posted: 3 June 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

17th April 2026

The population of Waiheke Island, just off the coast of the north island of New Zealand can’t have a huge population (just shy of 10,000, apparently), and renowned for its scenic beaches and subtropical climate, it’s not an obvious spawning ground for bands making sharp-edged post-punk. Surely this ‘slice of Heaven’ is a perfect oasis of contentment? What could anyone have to gripe about?

Of course, that’s not how it works. The human brain doesn’t work like that. Everything is fucked, people are people, and paradise is a myth. So here we are with the debut EP from Trauma Party, who describe themselves as purveyors of ‘post-punk desert lullabies and sonic anthems for the downtrodden.’

The last few years has seen post-punk become a real catch-all for anything that’s a bit guitary with a bit of edge but isn’t punk or indie (I’m not even going to start on the way the use of ‘indie’ has changed since the 80s or even 90s), but for me, there’s a quite specific period which sits tightly around ’79-’81 or thereabouts which saw bands exploring and experimenting in ways we hadn’t heard before. So much punk was simply pub rock played fast with the amps cranked up to nine and a half, and while it was a vital stage in the evolution of modern music, what emerged in its immediate wake was far more interesting – darker, weirder, and considerably more sophisticated, by and large. Not just musically, either, but conceptually, lyrically, things got more nuanced. Consider the leap from the sneering nihilism of pub-rock posers The Sex Pistols to the technical prowess and astute sociopolitical observations of Gang of Four, and the distinction becomes clear.

The title of this EP sounds as much like a veiled threat as a promise of a treat, although a treat it certainly is if you like your sounds discordant and difficult. As they pitch it, these are songs ‘Soaked in vats of noise and shaped on dive bar stages over the last 15 months. Culled, remodelled, and forged in the grit and sweat of the Dirt Track rehearsal space, this E.P. is a juicy little nugget for your collection.’ Three of the four songs have been released previously but they’ve been tweaked and remixed for this release, which has a commendable consistency.

‘Are We in Heaven’ arrives on a wave of choppy guitars with multi-layered vocals. it’s stuttering, jarring, awkward, claustrophobic, with heavy hints of early 80s The Fall with a bit of Wire and a dash of noise rock thrown into the mix. It makes you feel kinda tense, a bit paranoid, even. In terms of that post-punk experimentalism, that kind of boundary-pushing, that more nuanced level of articulation, it hits the spot.

Offering a different shade of heaven, the guitar melody of ‘Speak to Me’ carries echoes of The Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’ and pairs it with some choppiness that alludes to Gang of Four, and, again Wire, and at a mere two minutes and seventeen seconds, it’s concise and catchy and speaks of political unrest.

AA

‘Roll Up (It’s the New Truth)’ slams things home hard in driving waltz-time and kicks up a visceral energy to conclude the EP. It packs four songs into twelve minutes, and a lot happens in this brief time. Boom. Job done.

AA

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A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers – Towers of Silence

Posted: 19 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Lay Bare Recordings – 9th May 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

One may be inclined to jest that a release like this should carry a warning – but the joke falls flat when technically, it does: the notes which accompany the release on Bandcamp sets the scene for the debut EP from Dutch experimentalists of A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers thus:

Whilst most drone-metal outfits focus on creating atmosphere by composing ambient compositions with tremendous power and volume, the Lighthouse Keepers use more traditional doom/sludge metal as a starting point and explore its differences and similarities with genres such as free jazz, raga, noise and classical minimalism.

Elsewhere, they’re described as sounding like ‘a disturbed lovechild of OM, Sumac, Swans, Miles Davis, and Pandit Pran Nath, combining lengthy improvisations with ear-shattering explosions of intensity’. How could a lovechild of that lot be anything but disturbed?

And so it is that we enter by way of ‘The Massacre of Flour’, a title of which conjures images of a bloodbath in a bakery. What is sounds like is…. nothing short of wild. Its seven minutes leads the listener through a series of conjoined segments, arriving in a crazed blast of shrieking noise, a frenzied cacophony of feedback and squealing sax before lunging into a thick, sludge riff, which in turn yields to a slow, almost ambient drone passage with mystical swirls which rise like desert mirages. Each is gripping itself, and the transition to the next takes place almost imperceptibly: one moment you’re here, then, somehow, you’re there, in a completely different scene with no recollection of how you came to be here – rather like the way scenes change in dreams. And suddenly, the hazy serenity is torn asunder, lurching into a tectonic rift from which burst larval torture resembling Swans circa the Young God EP. It’s absolutely fucking brutal, the sound of pain, distilled and amplified

‘I Fuck People’, the shortest song on the EP, goes in hard on the avant-jazz noise chaos, forming a heavy undulation of bleats and shrieks by way of a backdrop to savage, ravaged, demonic vocals. It’s the sound of purgatorial torment. But all of this is simply a prelude to the main event, the nine-minute ‘Towers of Silence’, on which they really flex all of their muscles. Easing in gently with some abstract desert folk with hints of Eastern esotericism, it’s a slow, gradual build. There’s something meditative, spiritual in the vocals, until things begin to get twisted, mangled, and tangled. There’s anguish, there’s tension, and unease grows… breathe. But ululations which begin soothingly grow tense, and things spiral to a hypnotic cathedral of sound.

Towers of Silence may only contain three tracks with a combined duration of just over twenty minutes, but its range and intensity are something to behold. It’s drone metal, but not as we know it.

AA

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GURT – Survival of the Shittest

Posted: 12 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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5th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

I laugh, because the phrase ‘survival of the shittest’ was a phrase I used – a lot – in the late 90s, in my early years of being thrown into the corporate world after completing a degree in English literature. Back then, the belief still existed that a better education would lead to a better job, although in the three years between starting my degree and finishing it, a lot changed, and none of it for the good. ‘Graduate jobs’ stopped being a thing, meaning that it was a feat just to land a temp job doing data input work at an insurance company. It was fucking soul crushing, and Charles Bukowski’s Factotum became a book I came to relate to all too closely as I trudged my way through what felt like endless drudgery. And the managers, those who got promoted, those who did well? The common trait among them seemed to be that, when you boiled it down to the basics, they were all cunts. Backstabbers, self-promoters, overconfident wankers, twats with all the ambition but none of the skills… these bastards were killing it on the career ladder, while I sloughed away in a pit of despair. Scum floats, and all around me, it did. I wasn’t envious of their lives or their ‘careers’, but it was a gut-wrenching showcase of the shitshow that is capitalism and the greasy pole of corporate life: the survival of the shittest in sharp relief. This is now true of all aspects of life: as politics has become indistinguishable from business, and capitalism has taken over all aspects of existence, every bugger is using business-speak and striving to attain success not by means of hard work and talent, but by connivery and cuntishness. And it needs to be called out, and blocked wherever possible.

This new EP by GURT is nothing less than an absolute beast. With three tracks clocking in at ten and a half minutes, there’s no flab, no extravagant solos, no wanking about. They’re described as purveyors of ‘party doom’, but they’re a bit too uptempo to be doom and far too doomy to be party for most. Ultimately, their thing is a rabid racket, and at times, I’m reminded of the Leeds scene circa 2010 and shortly after, specifically around the emergence of crazed guitar noise acts like Pulled Apart by Horses and These Monsters. These were exciting times, particularly as it predated the need for professionalism to make it even onto a stage. Don’t get me wrong: these were great bands, but they were also wild, and things feel a lot more contained now.

GURT do not feel contained, GURT feel deranged, unhinged, rampant. ‘Live Nation, Dead Scene’ goes in all guns blazing, a rabid rager presumably targeted at the multinational ticket agency – operating what’s probably one of the biggest legal scams on the planet right now, with their exorbitant fees and dynamic pricing. The music industry has always sought to gouge every penny from fans while the artists themselves wallow at the bottom of the pile when it comes to benefiting from the proceeds, but Live Nation have hatched a whole new level of exploitatious robbery. They are literally – and yes, I do mean that – killing music for profit, and should be boycotted at all costs. I doubt this is a major issue for GURT.

The title track is a low-slung, sludgy, riff-driven roar, propelled by some ferocious drumming. The vocals are mangled to all hell, and it’s seriously gnarly.

Their cover of 2 Unlimited’s ‘No Limit’ simply shouldn’t work. It’s truly preposterous, audacious, and absurd. Metal covers of pop and dance tunes is old hat, predictable, corny… and yet they overcome all of this to conclude the EP with a ballsy, over-the-top take on a dance-pop song that’s as maligned as it was successful. This version’s not going to be making number one in a hundred countries around the world or filling dancefloors in perpetuity, but credit to GURT for the inspired choice. And now ‘party doom’ makes sense. Get on down, motherfuckers!

AA

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The Sunken Land – up close everything melts into air

Posted: 11 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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17th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Since emerging as The Sunken Land not so long ago, David Martin has focused on his consistent push forward, and his systematic output. One gets the impression that this is much more driven by a desire to render new sonic art, than the capitalist compulsion, now being pushed by streaming sites, to continuously create ‘content’. And for that, I say ‘good’: content creation as a goal in itself is as anathematic to art as AI itself: creation for the pleasure of the act, however, is an entirely different matter.

This, the third release by The Sunken Land – and the third in four months – is perhaps the most ambitious yet, making deeper explorations into texture, tone, and contrast.

Admirably, there is no information about this release: it’s left for the listener to unravel. And why shouldn’t it be? While it can be interesting to learn where there’s a specific back-story, motivation, meaning, or method which is vital to a work, more often than not, the endless explication given by some artists gets to be a drain after a while. It can also make the writing of a review feel somewhat futile, as if half the job’s already been done.

As the title perhaps suggests, there’s a sense of ephemerality to the three compositions on up close everything melts into air. The first, ‘scoria bricks’ is an eight-minute piece which overlays a heavy, pulsating drone, dense with distortion, with soft, comparatively clean notes, which at times sounds like Earth attempting to cover Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’. The contrasting parts, while distinctly separate, form a full-spectrum sonic flow, which is both immersive and strangely soothing.

Some cursory research, meanwhile, reveals that a scoria brick is a type of blue-grey brick made from slag, originally manufactured from the waste of the steelworks of Teesside, common across the North-East of England, and that ‘the word Scoria originally comes from Greek, meaning “Excrement”, but came to be used by the Romans for a kind of volcanic rock’. It’s more than I can manage to avoid making some reference to ‘shit bricks’ here. However, I also discovered that these are precisely the bricks, manufactured in the late nineteenth century, used in the back alleys in the part of York where I live, which, on a personal level, brought an additional dimension to listening back to the track, a sense of connection with a part of the local history I had hitherto been unaware of.

Arriving with a tearing detonation of a chord, ‘into air’ is again simultaneously heavy yet delicate, even light. The experience is perhaps evocative of waves crashing against rocks, and observing rainbows amidst the spray – something rare and special, and so fleeting and impermanent – barely even tangible, and completely without substance – that it hardly seems to exist at all. In a blink, the phenomena has passed, as if evaporated, quite literally ‘into air’.

The third and final piece, ‘white sike’, is both the briefest and the gentlest of the suite, and given the voyage of discovery inspired by ‘scoria bricks’, it’s perhaps most likely in some way connected to White Sike Wood, a forest some way west and a shade north of Harrogate, rather than the White Sike in Dumfries And Galloway. Its picked notes and slow movement is the sonic equivalent of dappled sun – rather than Sunn O))) – through leaves, and over its duration, a tranquillity descends.

AA

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Mass Hallucination – Mass Hallucination (EP)

Posted: 2 May 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Makeshift Swahili – 11th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Leeds’ Mass Hallunication’s thing is short, fast, noisy hardcore noise. This eponymous three-track EP is their debut release proper, following a digital-only self-released demo, which clearly laid the groundwork and set the template for this (right down to the fact that the three songs, despite being different songs, have the same durations of 1:19, 0:56, and 1:12, which is a remarkable coincidence).

And so it is that Mass Hallucination clocks in with a total run time of three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, and while it would be misleading to say that it’s more polished than the demo, the sound quality and the mix is better. Beyond that, this is savage, brutal, raw, rage triple-distilled and bottled fresh, rough and unaged at 100% proof.

‘Lacerated’ raises the curtain in a wail of feedback and a bowel-bothering bass which strolls in tentatively, before everything goes off in a flurry of unbridled violence. Centred around a cyclical riff, it’s a dirty gnarly assault delivered with a skin-shredding ferocity. Each track starts and ends in screeds of feedback, and the whole EP runs as a continuous piece, segued by the scream, the songs themselves blasting out in frenetic fits.

The lyrics are chewed, gargled, and spat, the words themselves lost in translation but the sentiments as clear as anything, everything coalescing to conjure a purgatorial purging, everything louder than everything else, a relentless roar of the most primal anger. Ugly and uncompromising, Mass Hallucination is pure catharsis, and a definitive statement.

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