Review: Tranquonauts ‘III’
When Paul Crick – better known to the faithful as Paul Lumber, the thunderous bass anchor of Melbourne, Australia’s much-celebrated psych rock power trio Seedy Jeezus – slid into my messages, my first thought was obvious: new Seedy Jeezus material. Maybe a release date. Maybe a tease. Something from their base, at least.
It was none of those things. What he was actually bringing to my attention was III– the new and very much unannounced Tranquonautsrecord that nobody knew was coming, least of all me. This is a project that has never once operated on conventional logic. No touring, no press cycle, or promotional strategy – just a handful of genuinely extraordinary musicians spread across two continents who occasionally decide to make something together, drop it into the world, and let it find its people. And it always finds its people, because the music is that good.
There’s something almost defiantly old-fashioned about how Tranquonauts operates. In an era where artists are expected to be perpetually visible and constantly feeding the content machine, this group essentially disappears between records and reappears with something that makes you wonder what everyone else has been doing with their time. No hype build-up, no singles drip-fed across six months. Just the music, when it’s ready, on its own terms. It makes the arrival of III feel like an event rather than just a release.
If you’ve followed them from the start you already know the trajectory. The first record was a revelation – Seedy Jeezus and Isaiah Mitchell of Earthless finding each other and discovering they could create something neither could alone, loose and exploratory and completely original. Tony Reed came aboard for 2and pushed things into genuinely ambitious territory – two side-long epics balancing progressive grandeur with hypnotic krautrock repetition that landed as one of the most immersive rock records of 2024 for anyone paying attention in this corner of the underground. It wasn’t just a good record, it was the kind that made you reassess what this project was capable of.
III is the one where Tranquonauts stops being a brilliant experiment and becomes something permanent. That shift is audible from the opening seconds of All Rise. Where previous material often felt like it was discovering itself in real time – which was genuinely part of the magic – this opener arrives with total conviction. It’s heavy, prog-leaning, and moves with a locked-in authority that tells you these musicians walked into the studio knowing exactly what they wanted to say. The riffs don’t drift; they land. The dynamics aren’t happy accidents; they’re engineered from the ground up. It’s a statement of intent from a band that has earned the right to make one.
The bass is enormous and the drums sit in a subterranean pocket, while the guitars coil and circle…
Space Child, the UFO cover at the heart of the record, is where things get genuinely interesting and where Tranquonauts most clearly demonstrate what makes them special. Chosen by Paul Crick, taking on a classic is always a risk – do it too faithfully and you’re redundant, do it too loosely and you lose what made it worth covering. Tranquonauts navigate this with an ease that makes the tightrope walk look effortless. They don’t copy it, they inhabit it, pulling the song through their own sonic lens without ever losing the thread of what made it a classic. By the time it’s done, it sounds completely and utterly like a Tranquonauts track – which is both the highest compliment you can pay a cover and proof that this band’s identity is now strong enough to absorb and transform outside material entirely on its own terms.
Broken Star is the slow-burn centrepiece, the track that asks the most patience and rewards it most generously. It opens with a low grinding gravity and builds with almost geological patience – no rush, no anxiety about getting to the good bit, because every moment of the build is the good bit. The bass is enormous and the drums sit in a subterranean pocket, while the guitars coil and circle without fully unleashing. At the finish, the track finally cracks open, it delivers something that feels less like a climax and more like something inevitable being uncovered. This is Tranquonauts at their most physically powerful, and in a catalogue already full of heavy music, it stands apart.
Closer S() Sigurnovais a Sigur Rós-inflected piece that does exactly what a great closer should – it gives the listener room to land after the intensity of what came before, without ever descending into mere ambience. There’s genuine movement at its centre, a sense of journey that keeps it engaged throughout. It lingers long after the record ends, the kind of track that makes you sit in silence for a moment before reaching to start the whole thing again.
Four tracks. Thirty-four minutes. Zero filler. Everything on III is there because it belongs, and the discipline that implies – from musicians capable of playing for hours if the mood takes them – speaks to a new level of artistic focus and confidence. What is most striking about the record is how much more personal it feels than anything they’ve done before. The looseness of the earlier records has been replaced by something lived-in and sure of itself. This is what a band sounds like when it finally knows what it is.
And then there’s the live dimension. III arrives alongside Tranquonauts‘ first-ever live shows, at Freak Valley 2026 as the opening shot. A project that has existed purely on record – assembled across studios in Melbourne and the American Pacific Northwest, sent back and forth across oceans finally existed in front of an audience. If III is as strong
Label: Kozmik Artifactz | Echodelick Records | Blown Music
Scribed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo
