Sumac

Pacific Northwest outfit Sumac formed around the combined efforts of post-metal stalwarts drawn from Isis and Russian Circles. Their music merges the crushing weight of sludge with the jagged unpredictability of experimental noise rock, building enormous, unrelenting pieces that shift through multiple time signatures and insert stretches of ambient texture. Themes of personal anxiety surface on the 2016 release What One Becomes, while the 2018 album Love in Shadow explores the transcendent dimensions of love. The band has maintained an ongoing partnership with Japanese noise guitarist Keiji Haino, documented on the 2022 live recording Into This Juvenile Apocalypse Our Golden Blood to Pour Let Us Never, and broadened its sonic range further with the 2024 album The Healer.

Guitarist and vocalist Aaron Turner, already known through Isis, Old Man Gloom, and Mamiffer, launched the project in 2014 together with Canadian drummer Nick Yacyshyn of Baptists and Hard Feelings plus bassist Brian Cook, whose résumé includes Botch, These Arms Are Snakes, and Russian Circles. Their first album, The Deal, appeared in 2015 as a double LP on Sige and a CD edition on Profound Lore. After signing with Thrill Jockey, the trio issued What One Becomes in 2016. Later that year the label put out the remix EP Before You I Appear, which incorporated reworkings by Kevin Drumm and Samuel Kerridge. Sige followed in February 2018 with the cassette WFMU, capturing a 2016 session recorded for Brian Turner’s program on the New Jersey free-form station.

That same month Thrill Jockey released the first Haino collaboration, American Dollar Bill: Keep Facing Sideways, You're Too Hideous to Look at Face On. Material from those sessions shaped the subsequent album Love in Shadow, which arrived in September. A second set of Haino recordings surfaced in 2019 on Trost under the title Even for Just the Briefest Moment/Keep Charging This "Expiation"/Plug in to Making It Slightly Better. Thrill Jockey issued May You Be Held, a meditation on humanism and compassion, in 2020. The 2019 live encounter with Haino yielded Into This Juvenile Apocalypse Our Golden Blood to Pour Let Us Never, released in 2022. The Healer, an intense blend of sludge and free improvisation, followed in 2024, accompanied by the remix EP The Keeper’s Tongue featuring contributions from Moor Mother and Ravon Chacon.