Twenty years ago New Orleans’ EYEHATEGOD and Nottingham’s Iron Monkey were locked into a race to produce the heaviest album ever. Dan Franklin revisits Iron Monkey’s self-titled debut and Dopesick

Call it ‘sludge’ if you have to. EYEHATEGOD prefer ‘southern hardcore blues’, wrenched from the bayou of New Orleans: progeny of punk and doom. ‘Lack Of Almost Everything’ from their third album Dopesick, if not quite a badge of honour, tells you all you need about their resignation and bitter humour. Philip Anselmo (ex-Pantera frontman disgraced at the outset of 2016 for throwing a Nazi salute and screaming “White Power” at the end of a tribute gig for murdered bandmate Dimebag Darrell) supplied an endorsement for the 2006 reissues of their…

The post Smack Down: EYEHATEGOD Versus Iron Monkey & The Heaviest LP Of 1996 appeared first on The Quietus.

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Stripped back to a two-piece, the latest from the Seattle-born drone monsters returns the group to their thrillingly arboreal roots

Sunn O))) by Charles Peterson

“He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them.”

So begins Algernon Blackwood’s 1912 novella, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, a rich and unsettling tale that follows a man who, influenced by a painter specialising in portraits of trees, develops a strange obsession with the woodland surrounding his home. Whilst the painter’s arboreal depictions are said to be “wildly inaccurate” and at times approaching the ludicrous, his skill lies in capturing the “personality” of a particular tree: “friendly or hostile, good or evil. It emerged.”

Anyone who has spent time in…

The post The Band Whom the Trees Loved: SUNN O))) by SUNN O))) appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/the-band-whom-the-trees-loved-sunn-o-by-sunn-o/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-band-whom-the-trees-loved-sunn-o-by-sunn-o

Xylitol

Blumenfantasie

The Brighton-based DJ and producer grapples with the physical matter of sound – with electrifying results

Blumenfantasie by Xylitol

When I first read a description of the Brighton-based producer and DJ Xylitol’s music that referred to its mixture of kosmische and jungle, I approached it with a good deal of scepticism. That’s not to say the two elements cannot, or should not, be mixed – of course there’s a wealth of creative potential in making beat-driven dance music that mines the origins of electronic sound. But when I hear of any DJ invoking that golden age of synth music, more often than not what comes to mind is the most antiseptic form of electronic music, one that uses arpeggiating, wavy synths with…

The post Xylitol – Blumenfantasie appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/xylitol-blumenfantasie-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=xylitol-blumenfantasie-review

The Shits

Diet Of Worms

With their third album, the Leeds noise-punks are in danger of becoming an institution

Diet Of Worms by The Shits

The Shits have been a band for a little under nine years and Diet Of Worms is their third album. Neither of which is especially eye-catching as statistics go, but noteworthy in the context of the Leeds DIY punk scene in which they originate, where bands (including ones featuring members of The Shits) frequently rise and fall leaving hardly any documented evidence they were there. A lot of the groups who historically pre-empted the sound heard on Diet Of Worms – noise rock, pigfuck, scum rock, sludge punk or some other microgenre terminology – didn’t stick around for anything…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/the-shits-diet-of-worms-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-shits-diet-of-worms-review

From cooperation in the face of political tension, to complex approaches to tradition, Jakub Knera explores the many driving forces of Croatia’s underground music scene, and picks out 10 key releases

Mimika Orchestra, photo by Marina Uzelac

I wonder where the story begins for this exploration of Croatian music. Maybe with my mother’s recollections of a holiday on Lošinj Island in Yugoslavia, in August 1985, seven months before I was born. She bought me a terrycloth jumpsuit, unavailable in Poland – in that period, new things only arrived from German relatives. Or maybe it starts in Groningen in 2025, when the post rock tambura that Croation outfit Nemeček were using during their set at ESNS caught my attention. 

Or maybe the real beginning…

The post Inner Ear: Croatian Music for April, by Jakub Knera appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/quietus-international/croation-underground-diy-music-guide-inner-ear/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=croation-underground-diy-music-guide-inner-ear

Sean Kitching speaks to Brian Hageman, Mark Davies and Hugh Swarts of TFUL282 about recording at Steve Albini’s house and setting John Cage’s voice to a glitchy dancefloor banger, while offering ten points of entry to their unique back catalogue

TFUL282 by Michael Galinsky

 Hailing largely from rural Iowa, the members of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 relocated to the Bay Area in 1986, from where they released seven unique studio albums between 1988 and 2001. A collision of divergent personalities and eclectic music tastes (classical music, big band jazz, easy listening, The Beatles, Ennio Morricone, Perez Prado, Zoviet France, Gastr del Sol, The Residents, to name but a few), with an ear for a great pop tune as well as a…

The post The Strange World Of… Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/interviews/strange-world-of/thinking-fellers-union-best-music/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=thinking-fellers-union-best-music

Catch up with everything we wrote about in March.

With March done and dusted with the appalling pollen of early spring, we’re back with your regular playlist of everything we wrote about over the past four or so weeks, available on Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, Qobuz and Deezer. Firstly, a reminder of the other perks our Subscriber and Subscriber Plus tier members received during that time: we had the Low Culture Podcast on Suicide’s debut album, an Organic Intelligence newsletter on psychedelic Porto, and the Low Culture Essay featuring Natalie Marlin on the relationship between The Chemical Brothers’ Hanna soundtrack and her trans identity. Subscriber Plus tier members have their bonus playlists featuring music from Baker’s Dozen selections by Sarah Nixey of Black Box Recorder, Sherelle…

The post Our Subscriber-Exclusive Playlist for March 2026 appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/subscriber-area/monthly-playlists/our-subscriber-exclusive-playlist-for-march-2026/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=our-subscriber-exclusive-playlist-for-march-2026

Ahead of their show at Bristol New Music, Bill Orcutt, Steve Shelley and Ethan Miller tell Jennifer Lucy Allan how a Grateful Dead tribute show led to their acclaimed new collaboration, the joy of bootlegs, and how they’re avoiding the ego-driven pitfalls that have dogged supergroups past

Photo by Sheva Kafai

“Our delightful origin story takes place around a Grateful Dead tribute show that Bill and I played together,” says Ethan Miller, when I ask how he, guitarist Bill Orcutt, and drummer Steve Shelley came to form a trio. “Don’t tell anybody that though!” 

I regretfully inform him that we are on the record. “Bill isn’t a huge Dead fan,” he explains, “but after that show, Bill told me how fun it was…

The post Triple Threat: An Interview with Orcutt Shelley Miller appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/interviews/orcutt-shelley-miller-interview-bristol-new-music/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=orcutt-shelley-miller-interview-bristol-new-music

After stripping pop down to its electro-skeleton in the first half of the decade, Prince built it back up from bones in 1986, says Toby Manning

 Prince always had a strange relationship to individualism, the ethos that was as constitutive of the 80s as his own music. As a one-man band, Prince pioneered the nervy, synthy new-wave/disco hybrid that became 80s pop, though his hits tended to be band productions like 1983’s ‘Little Red Corvette’ or the previous year’s ‘1999’. Paradoxically, once he formed a proper band, The Revolution, Prince often still played every instrument himself, as on 1984 smash ‘When Doves Cry’. Yet this control freakery didn’t extend to billing or composer credits: Prince even attributed the solo-written ‘Purple Rain’ to…

The post Prince’s Parade (Under The Cherry Moon) 40 Years On appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/prince-parade-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=prince-parade-review

Irreversible Entanglements

Future Present Past

Their second album for Impulse! records finds the improvising quintet in a surprisingly hopeful place, finds Andrew Taylor-Dawson

Since forming in 2015, free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements have charted a singular musical course. Their sound marries the fiery liberation poetry of Camae Ayewa (better known as Moor Mother), with exploratory and often improvisational brass from trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and saxophonist Keir Neuringer. Grounding their experimental style are double bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes.

The band’s music exists in a space between wild artistic freedom and the righteous anger that defines the lyrics of Moor Mother. Their focus on social and racial justice is written into their DNA. They did after all first come together as part of a…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/irreversible-entanglements-future-present-past-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=irreversible-entanglements-future-present-past-review