Yes, what can you actually say about a new album from Sunn O)))? The duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson have been celebrating the intense physical experience of noise for almost thirty years. Once founded as a tribute to Cobain roommate Dylan Carlson’s legendary band Earth, they have now become the absolute leading band in a genre that they essentially define themselves. They make doom metal like their former role model Earth, of course, but somehow also ambient, and aren’t the capes they wear live somehow a reference to Black Metal or the Middle Ages?
And didn’t you always appear on stage with Attila Csihar from Mayhem? Or is this all clearly experimental music or performance art? Definitely not something you would listen to while relaxing on the sofa in the evening. Or maybe it is? The New York Times called it “heady metal” almost twenty years ago, cerebral metal – and that is perhaps the best description to date of what Sunn O))) are up to.
Their first self-titled album and also their first since 2019 also celebrates a kind of new beginning: the tours of the last few years, during which the two of them were alone on stage, inspired them to record all the instruments and tracks alone in the studio as a couple. The result is six songs between seven and a half and almost 20 minutes, dark meditations that sound like abandoned landscapes, like destruction – and somehow also like rebirth. Sunn O))) are a borderline experience, perhaps today more than ever.
This review appears in Musikexpress 4/2026.
