Sunn O))): Sunn O))) Album Review

Sunn O))) make ritual music, not casual music. Both their albums and their live shows demand you completely surrender mind and body to punishingly loud guitar drone suffused with the menace of black metal and the obstinacy of minimalist art music. Yet even within the duo’s daunting catalog, their new self-titled album exerts a special pull. Though it’s the first one to strip their lineup down to just core members Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley, it feels like their biggest and most forbidding work yet.

It certainly has the rest of their catalog beat as far as sheer density. Producer Brad Wood estimates each song has at least 130 tracks of guitar, all recorded at a remote Washington cabin where the duo’s amp noise could radiate through the surrounding wilderness. Past milestones like Black One and Monoliths & Dimensions felt big in the same way as a classic-rock longplayer that might blow an impressionable kid’s mind. Sunn O))) feels big in the way of an immovable art piece, and it’s worth having on your record shelf as an object of awe, a Necronomicon whose red glow might call to you on some spooky evening.

Following a long stretch on Anderson’s Southern Lord label, Sunn O))) is the band’s first release on Sub Pop, which is presumably footing the bill for the cabin and all those guitar tracks. This isn’t the only milestone for the grim-robed duo in the time since their last album Pyroclasts in 2019. O’Malley married minimalist composer Kali Malone in 2023, with whom he collaborated that same year on the three-hour drone colossus Does Spring Hide Its Joy; like that album, Sunn O))) is concerned with interactions between overtones and feedback over mettle-testing running times. The 18-minute titans “XXANN” and “Mindrolling” function more like the music on Folke Rabe’s What?? or the late Éliane Radigue’s Trilogie de la Mort than anything in the blackened Norwegian canon, from which the band drew its aesthetic and many of its collaborators early on.

Notably, this is the Sunn O))) album most concerned with what happens when the guitars stop. “Butch’s Guns” starts up several times, then stops with an almost piercing cut to silence. It’s a subtle flex of how easily they can control their instruments, but on “Everett Moses” they yield to a blizzard of amp static in one of the most sudden and shocking moments in the Sunn O))) catalog. On closer “Glory Black,” Sunn’s rivers of guitar sludge empty into a sparse improvisation on a rusty-sounding upright piano. The silence between the notes isn’t soothing; it has you perking your ears up, looking for any signs of trouble.

If Sunn O))) proves nothing else, it’s that the two musicians need not outsource their menace and are perfectly capable of conjuring clouds of darkness on their own. No Malefic locked in a coffin with a microphone; no Attila Csihar dressed as a peacocking corpse. The title of “Does Anyone Hear Like Venom?” pays tribute to the British band whose seminal 1982 album Black Metal was extreme enough to give its name to an entire genre; its rearing, guffawing, equine waves of amp noise fit nicely with Venom’s vision of hell, but for the most part any trace of that genre’s aesthetic has been scrubbed.