Review: SUMAC ‘The Healer’

SUMAC are a band that I’ve always heard good things about, but never managed to get around to listening to them properly. Considering they are made up of current and former members of bands like ISIS, Russian Circles, Baptists, Genghis Tron, Old Man Gloom and Botch to name a few, this qualifies as not only a supergroup but also one very much in my wheelhouse. But we all have blind spots, and we should strive to fix those if we can. The band’s new record is called The Healer and it is out now through Thrill Jockey Records.

Cavernous atmospheric post-sludge is the order of the day here, and that captures the beauty and heft of everything SUMACtouches. Opener World Of Light is a mere TWENTY EIGHT minutes long, a swirling and soaring odyssey of sludgy riffs, glorious atmospherics and spine tingling moments. There are grumbling, rumbling, bowel scraping bass lines, throbbing drones of distortion, thunderous crashing sludge and murky roars; a real monster of a track that covers pretty much all the bases in one go. It is difficult to really describe the full extent of this track without referring to it as more like a movement than a song; a piece where the emotions ebb and flow, the heft is transient.

Yellow Dawn teases you into a state of tranquillity before crunchy, atonal hardcore riffs pull in dissonant directions and roll over you in waves before it tones right back down again. The dynamic shifts between the angular brutality of that first section of New Rites and the shimmering clean, almost ambient acoustic style of other moments is startling at times; you’d never believe that this is all the work of the same band, such is the variety of styles mixed in here. But when you see the members’ backgrounds, and their singular focus into what is a record of depth, ethereal beauty and guttural primality, it all starts to make sense. It feels like Station meets Celestial meets Bloodmines meets American Nervoso, all smothered in sludgy goodness.

There are grumbling, rumbling, bowel scraping bass lines, throbbing drones of distortion, thunderous crashing sludge and murky roars…

The howling ferocity of The Stone’s Turnat the start gradually dissolves into a ghostly post metal journey, where Boris-esque squalling guitar solos run riot at one point, hypnotising death/doom rumbles through this wasteland, and even a real drift back to the heady days of Oceanic around the twenty minute mark. I can’t think of a single other band that could do this so cohesively.

I won’t lie, The Healer may not be for everyone; its density and shapeshifting nature may prove to be too much for some but if you really dedicate your time to it, you will find a record that is almost humbling in its quality. Put on a real good set of headphones, find yourself eighty-five minutes of peace and alone time, then sink into this record. Let SUMAC surround you, absorb you, thrill you and devastate you. Then you will understand that The Healer is one of 2024’s most essential albums.

Label: Thrill Jockey Records
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Twitter | Instagram

Scribed by: Sandy Williamson