Returning with mightier riffs and wilder improvisations than ever, the trio offers a spiritual vision of metal, one well timed to a moment of crisis.
Few bands clad a soft heart in tensile steel quite like Sumac. All of the abstruse metal trio’s four albums over the last five years have been ever more imposing, like self-perpetuating obstacle courses in hell. Ricocheting between formidable doom and barbed improvisation, Sumac sound preternaturally belligerent. But the group’s core is the spiritual yearning of Aaron Turner, who since his later days in Isis has often attempted to repurpose metal’s malevolent mechanics for personal transcendence. Sumac’s May You Be Held might be the closest he has ever come. For a vertiginous hour, Sumac pirouette around riffs and collapse into bedlam, hurtle through feedback and snap back into lockstep. As violent as they may sometimes seem, these songs are timely psalms of perseverance and rebirth, weaponized for whatever comes next.
Three years ago, Sumac traveled to Tokyo to work with Japanese experimental godhead Keiji Haino. That experience not only led to two intriguing collaborative LPs but also challenged Sumac to stretch their parameters; their subsequent full-length, 2018’s colossal Love in Shadow, disrupted their formerly relentless force with unmoored instrumental explorations and extreme dynamics. May You Be Held indulges this tension like a favorite new habit. The metal sections are mightier, tightened with pneumatic precision. The improvisations, meanwhile, are more adventurous, pushing harder against the boundaries of the songs themselves. The uncanny hybrid suggests something Peter Brötzmann’s Machine Gun band might have made in a different setting, or something his son, Caspar, might have eventually found with his own Massaker. Where those splenetic groups decried our failures, Sumac’s tirades ponder fixing them, too.
Sumac are at their most compelling on tracks that occupy an LP’s entire side, where disparate elements can clash at length. They race, for instance, into the 20-minute title track like a power trio of agile all-stars, moving in perfect lockstep through a rhythm and riff that recall Touch & Go’s best toughies. It begins with a bleak picture of a warming world, scarred by fires and floods and droughts. But in the second half, after an impasse of noise that curdles until it crumbles, Turner shifts into a prayer—perhaps for the next generation (he is a new father, after all), perhaps for the world at large. “May the light dance in your eyes,” he shouts as the song flirts with anthem status, like “Forever Young” for metal-loving parents. “May your limbs move through gleaming waves.” Sumac’s jarring sounds emphasize the long odds of such well wishes.
“Consumed,” likewise, is a hard-won paean to resilience—and perhaps the pinnacle of Sumac’s first six years. For most of these 16 minutes, Sumac seesaw between churning sections so muscular they’d make Mastodon flinch and stark atmospheric spans that feel like walking into the mouth of some haunted cavern. Turner scowls at a world of ruin, a place of acrid smoke and desiccated bodies. The band slams into a wall of feedback only to return twice as heavy, twice as fast, and exponentially more exhilarating. Turner sings of a hero born to save the world, or at least believe that it might be saved. It’s an evangelical moment, enough to make you momentarily trust in deliverance.
May You Be Held works a lot like a church service—tales of tribulation and evil meted out alongside words of encouragement, delivered with the high volume of utter conviction. The album begins with a gorgeous but ghostly invocation in which Nick Yacyshyn’s bowed vibraphone drones wrap around Turner’s meticulous feedback and Brian Cook’s rumbling bass like lace. An hour later, the record ends with a furtively optimistic benediction: A stunted guitar riff and faint percussion crawl from the morass of a church organ played by Turner’s collaborator and wife Faith Coloccia. “Metal has always been for me an affirmation of life, one of the only ways I’ve felt spiritual ecstasy,” Turner recently told me. “Sumac is almost this ritualistic practice of tapping into that energy.”
Both Turner’s stentorian bark and Sumac’s bellicose sound can be off-putting; this is not passive or polite music. But this kind of sermon feels especially galvanizing right now, in a moment where a steady tide of endless dread suggests at least the possibility of actual insurgency. May You Be Held reckons with how bad it may truly get—“Vomit and ash/Spilled across the floor,” Turner grunts at the album’s center—and tries to fight to the other side.
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