House Of Mythology – 9th January 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
Zu just keep on defying genre and creating music that lands from a different angle every time, even after the best part of thirty years. While postmodernism – which emerged in the 1950s and became the defining mode of art and culture from the 1980s – fundamentally revelled in endless recycling, embracing the notion that anything original has already been done, and that the future of creativity lies in how creatively one may appropriate and hybridize the past, Zu have spent their career bucking that trend with relentless creative innovation.
After a six-year lull, Ferrum Sidereum is their second release of 2025, following the wildly eclectic Jazzisdead under the moniker of RuinsZu in April, a live document of a collaboration between Zu bassist Massimo Pupillo and saxophonist Luca T. Mai, with drummer Yoshida Tatsuya, founder of the Japanese band Ruins.
Ferrum Sidereum – Latin for ‘cosmic iron’ finds the core trio back in the studio, and drawing inspiration ‘from the mythological significance of meteoritic iron, found in artefacts like ancient Egyptian ritual objects, Tibenta ‘Phurpa’ blades, and the celestial sword of Archangel St Michael. This elemental force,’ they write, ‘imbues every moment of the album’s apocalyptic sound.’ On a purely personal level, I’m drawn immediately by the idea of an ‘apocalyptic sound’. We live in what feels like apocalyptic times, after all. I am surely not alone in feeling that since the arrival of the pandemic, we’re racing towards the end of days, and if anything, the exponential rise of AI only seems to be accelerating that race.
Zu are staunchly anti-AI when it comes to their own approach to art – a topic they touch on with single cut ‘A.I. Hive Mind’ – and explain, “We are very spiritually-oriented people,” says Massimo. “Machines and AI do not have spirituality. So they can mimic and they can assemble existing things, but they cannot create. That spirit is probably the most important thing that our music carries.”
Recent AI releases by the howlingly abysmal artificially-generated retro-rock act The Velvet Sundown and even more cringe-inducingly gash country wank of Breaking Rust may show how far the technology has come, but simultaneously reveals just how it’s absolutely no substitute for real, human-made art. This derivative, soulless wank is beyond derivative: that is to say, it’s precisely what you’d expect from melting down the entirety of a genre and regurgitating the lowest common denominator output. It also demonstrates precisely why Zu could never be recreated by any kind of digital modelling. They are completely off the wall in every direction all at once, and on Ferrum Sidereum, ‘The music combines the complexity of progressive rock, the grit of industrial music, the precision of metal, the spirit and energy of punk, and the freedom of jazz. The result is a sonic journey that is as cerebral as it is visceral, defying easy categorisation while remaining unmistakably Zu.’
‘Charagma’ makes for a forceful opener. It’s a full-on sonic blast, at first harsh noise, then pounding industrial riffery, which lunges into sprawling jazz-infused metal, then lurches back to the riffery but with an expansive, proggy twist. It’s a big seven minutes – which is different from a long seven minutes. It doesn’t drag, but what it does do it leave you with whiplash. ‘Golgotha’ whips out all the brass and woodwind at once, and this provides the backdrop to some highly-detailed math-rock which goes all-out crazed around the three-minute mark. And it turns out they’re just warming up.
There’s some hefty chug and churn going on here. There’s also a whole load of manic horns blasting away. Recent single ‘Kether’ is representative, but at the same time not, in that it’s a seven-and-a-half-minute beast of a piece that lurches and lumbers all over, but there’s no way anything can be truly representative of an album that covers so much ground, and is so wildly unpredictable. ‘Kether’ reflects the heavier end of the album… and also the more twisty, melodic side, too – which essentially makes my point. Any thirty second snippet of the album would present a different story. The aforementioned ‘A.I. Hive Mind’ is spasmodic, jazzy, mathy, frenetic, intense, six songs in one.
‘La Donna Vestita De Sole’, the first of the album’s megalithic cornerstones cocking in at nearly ten minutes stands, towering, in the centre. Initially it’s soothing, smoothing, restful, ambient, but of course built to tumultuous towers of monumentally powerful prog, and they lay down some seriously solid grooves. ‘Hymn of the Pearl’ – clocking in at just over nine and half minutes again starts out easy in a haze of slow-building bass and electronic, a bass groove building until it eventually erupts – and when it does, it does, massively.
Arriving at the title track and finale, amidst a whirlwind of noise and all kinds of otherness, there’s something of a post-punk vibe in the build-up… not to mention bass to make you shit your pants. But then it’s got desert rock vibes and elements of Krautrock as it pushes forward, and they still find time for an explosive post-rock crescendo around a third of the way in. The finale is devastating. It’s too much to keep up with – and at the same time, it’s perfection. Zu do zu, as they say. Alright, not, but close enough. The bottom line is that this is a uniquely crafted work, to which AI could never get close. Not remotely.
Ferrum Sidereum is simply huge in every respect: scope, scale, ambition, sound, production. It’s heavy, it’s inspired, and it’s an album to lose yourself in.
AA
Aural Aggravation 