This album is bloated, uncompromising, conceptually convoluted and completely over the top; I love it. The first movement, 'To The Earth' is opulent, muscular and brash, amidst the chaos the doomy bass, guttural baritone sax and thundering percussion stands out.
'To The Moon' is a liminal progression, twisted and primal, while the third act 'To The Stars' is constructed of yawning, cosmic drones and entrancing sitars. It's been a long time since I've heard an album as transportative as this!

A full-throated chasm of churning void captured with absolute clarity, Pyroclasts is the pulverising sister-piece to Life Metal, and together the two albums are maybe the boldest and most tonally perfect foray into oblivion that Sunn have made.

This is sonically disturbing for even a long-term fan, the whole album one feels a tension that doesn't break.
Where her previous use of religious imagery seemed to be a reappropriation of violence, here it is an intercession for help against her betrayer, unexpectedly earnest, unexpectedly tender. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the flat, discordant and far more unsettling reconception of the titular refrain of 2017s ABD. 'If you thought you knew me' this record implies, 'you didn't."'

Hayter crawls inside the historic and abusive deathcult of white 'outsider' masculinity and appropriates it so thoroughly that it's never clear if she is singing from the perspective of an avenging nemesis or from an abuser. Heartrending, soaring and yet chillingly misanthropic, an indictment against extreme music culture (and it's 'flirtation' with white supremacist iconography) and possibly the sharpest, most intertextual and wide-reaching piece of extreme music yet.

A series of (mostly) short sketches showing the breathtaking glory of Caligula in its nascent form; all the elements are here, but in different configurations, the tone unfixed, the refrain from one song over the melody of another like a remix in reverse. The overall effect is haunting and unsettling as well as informative, an archaelogical coda to one of most powerful albums in extreme music history.

A wild and tender anti-authoritarian piano ballad that swiftly escalates into a disconcerting outpouring of revenge and religion, choral wails, dischordant drones and blast-beats.

The guitar fuzz is perfectly calibrated to create a numbing, harmonic fog through which Hayter's voice soars devastatingly.

This oft-covered song has never felt so raw, so real, so broken, the opening line so devastatingly appropriate for it's time. As usual, LI captures something unbearably direct and difficult to face in her artistic choices.

continuing from FIYH, this is blackpilled as all fuck; written and delivered with the raw candidness and self-mocking bitterness of a high-schoolers journal, and set to beats that are laser-focused to keep my distractable mind topped up on angry dopamine. A tight 21 minutes of weaponised disgust.

If 2020/21 needs a soundtrack, this is top of the list. A chaotic mess of hope and hopelessness, guilt, anger, noise, glitch, nu-metal, techno and heart, I feel like you either don't get it all or you REALLY fucking get it.

Hold onto your fucking balls, this is going to kill you. Something about Ada Rook and Black Dresses never fails to tap into the emotional turbulence and vulnerability of my teen years, and this reminds me of the superficially deep and serious nu-metal I lapped up back then but simultaneously takes itself less seriously yet manages to deliver some raw emotional gut punches in the guise of tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. Ada's growl is iconic, and her electronic production is addictive as all fuck.

A fucked scream at the fascist death machine, this albums invites you into Wash's pain and it's confrontational, uncompromising, cathartic and transformative in equal measure.

Studiously caustic alchemical noise, punctuated by sharp bursts of furiously pounding drums and purgatorial growls. The album's flow is almost mechanical, and mathematically perverse. You get the impression that every seemingly spontaneous volte-face has a place in some grand plan. Only for the true experimental connoisieur.

Enlightenment at gunpoint, Gnod is a runaway mechanical colossus flattening everything into paste. This is the kind of music Throbbing Gristle or Coil would have made if they had balls the size of houses.

This thing is fuckin vast, a sleek mechanical landscape from horizon to horizon, impenetrable and antihuman as the self-sustaining mechanisms of power hinted at through audio clippings and song titles.

A gentle howl, the mellow folky keys at times evoke a hurdy-gurdy (unless there is one?), weaving labyrinthine paths of folk into the hypnotic krauty soundscape, underpinned by the loose, reverberant patterns of the drums.Overall this is a really dynamic and memorable new take on the psych/kraut genre.

Big, warm, apocalyptic walls of sound, the songs radiation would sing.

Indie-punk bangers with strong Afro-Caribbean grooves; The drumming is infectiously energetic, while the whimsically meandering guitar has a deep liquid tone that is a fucking delight. Don't know if there's any connection to Zun Zun Egui but Sacred Paws are a VERY worthy successor regardless!

Light and heartwarming sounds with just a little pensive edge; Run/Sun is charming and disarming, an album to open up and be vulnerable with.

Exhilarating freeform dada by an orchestra responding to gestures and graphics. Wild unpredictable clatter and disharmony. Brilliant!