SUMAC, like death, are coming for us all. Their new album, The Healer, is their longest to date, a cavernous maze of noise, an ocean of cathartic doom, and a meditative drone that packs it all into four tracks that bring the album to a whopping hour and 16-minute runtime. The result is one of the best metal records of the year. Its feature film length runtime is fitting in that the whole sit-down experience (emphasis on experience), while daunting and perhaps foreign to some listeners in the current era of 20-second content (not to be an old geezer about it), is a rewarding thing to be weathered.
The journey relies on SUMAC’s ability to let these passages breathe and eventually erupt like volcanos. The ferociously challenging experimental metal band bombards the listener with everything from hypnotic doom metal dirges to long sections that venture into the territory of free improv and noise music. The songs swell and stretch out like giants across a horizon until they crack, splinter, and explode before finally reassembling into new and grotesquely magnificent forms. If that last bit sounds like an oxymoron, listen to the album it will all start to make sense.
SUMAC are built not to fit in. They are made up of members of influential groups from the cinematic, post-metal genre, like Russian Circles and Isis, but here depart into much darker, headier spaces. When regarded by the often rigidly traditionalist standards of metal and its major sub-genres (doom, death, black, etc.) SUMAC are almost antagonistically weird in a way that metal rule breakers like Neurosis were in decades prior. The guitars sound scratchy and metallic rather than fuzzed out, calling to mind the spindly darkness of bands like Slint. The speed and chaos here seem to have more to do with the free playing of Bill Orcutt or no-wave music than the shredding of progressive rock or death metal. Their approach, on paper, seems simple and typical of even the most basic of garage bands: Taking established structures and riffs and expanding on them through improvisation.
Once listened to, you find your mind tangled into knots, as the songs seem paradoxically too structured to be improvised and too improvised to have been composed on a few sheets of paper. They have often been deemed too experimental and odd by metal blogs but, in turn, can easily turn off experimental music fans for their metal-adjacent vocal stylings and tropes. SUMAC are for the adventurous listener, plain and simple. If you are open and ready for something expansive, strange, and even off-putting, this is a wild part of the deep end. Dive in.
To sum up the twists and turns on these four colossal tracks would take more space than is allotted in this review. Nevertheless, they are worthy of at least an attempt. The saga begins with “World of Light”, which, despite its title, feels like it would best be listened to while alone in a darkened room, perhaps with one lit candle. Right from the very first note (or whatever one wishes to call it), a metal music listener is led into the first trap. Yes, there is the first guttural guitar belch, and the metal listener might assume things about where and when “the bass will drop”, and assume the dramatic arc of what is to come before this 25-minute song has entered its third minute.
First of all, the aforementioned introductory guttural utterance, we start to realize, sounds more like a bass guitar with strings that are about to snap off, a sound that is far from the warm fuzz of a Big Muff doom riff. Scrapings and strange exterior sounds are left to feedback and ring at high octaves for daunting periods. The tension here and throughout The Healer can be gripping and stressful. Anyone who has ever played music in an even semi-abstract way will feel the terror of choice here, a group circling for a place to land and drop their payload of sorts. There is a worry that can be felt that someone will come in too soon, the fear that where the band lands will not live up to the build. SUMAC flourish and build with aggressive flailing in a mode of some sort of metal adjacent to free jazz.
Aaron Turner does not “shred” here so much as he pummels and strangles his instruments as the massive drums of Nick Yacyshyn coat everything around him. Turner’s vocals enter the picture and once again sound, at first glance, familiar, the deep guttural roar of heavy music, but as the barrage continues, we realize Turner is not some demonic beast but simply a man screaming in a room. Across The Healer‘s length, he sounds naked, angry, and often filled with a strange bliss. The first proper point where all three members begin a doom-esque march comes about 13 minutes into this track. The moment feels earned and leads to a rock-forward finale that teases that there is more to come (there is).
It’s just the beginning. “Yellow Dawn” brings us fully into “The World of Light”, that is The Healer, revealing a warped psychedelia with an opening organ drone that turns into something that feels like SUMAC’s metal forward play on something like “The End” by the Doors. Despite this retro comparison, the band defies lazy psychedelia, seeking the transcendence of this mode while not shying away from the transgressive embrace of a bad trip. It all comes complete with Wah-Wah-Pedal-drenched guitar antics that sound like a perverse melding of Jimi Hendrix and Merzbow. The locked grooves that SUMAC fall into here cause those trying to follow it all, making the careful listener worry that one of these three musicians will fall behind and lose sight of the other two. That never happens. Many heavy bands sound produced to the point of sounding like machines that are simply doing what machines do, but here, Sumac’s task of pulling off such a song feels dauntingly human, and when they achieve their goal, it genuinely feels like a victory.
The song “New Rites” proves that The Healer is the rare hour-plus album that gets better halfway through. Moreover, it’s the most immediate track and feels warranted after all the building and deconstructing during the previous two tracks. It’s the crowning jewel and offers one of the most stunning passages on any heavy release this year, a storm of burst beats that are reminiscent of black metal but, like the band’s approach to doom metal, is too strange and too SUMAC to be given such an easy genre tag.
So where does this all end? On another 20-minute song, of course. Is it stunning? Absolutely. “Stones Throw” is an assured finish where SUMAC fully deconstruct the speedier side of metal in a similar way that they deconstructed “slow metal” on the opening track, blistering forth with bursts of free noise, allowing every member to follow their own explorations while always remaining a unit. It’s all a frightening and rewarding experience to endure. If you indeed began listening to The Healer in a darkened room with a single candle, you may, by the time of its finale, find the room burning all around you.
As The Healer reaches an unashamed headbanging close, you may be unable to help yourself from dancing in the wreckage of it all. It feels like the culmination of a sort of trilogy for SUMAC that began with 2018’s Love In Shadow and continued with the equally stunning May You Be Held in 2020. It’s a much-earned (that word again) moment where SUMAC freely channel their visions to become who they are. The results are overwhelming. You won’t believe your ears.