Band: Sugar Horse
Single: GakEater
Label: Self-released
Release date: 31 October
Sounds like: Eating your own head on an acid holiday
It’s comforting that every Sugar Horse track seems like it could soundtrack the end of the world. If that isn’t a statement to make you want to listen, I don’t know what is. Those unfamiliar with the Bristol four-piece should consult this article I wrote about them near the beginning of the year on their spectacular Druj EP.
Sugar Horse are a band that fall into the realm of unclassifiable. Their sound could almost be akin to post-metal, with elements of bludgeoning hardcore, waves of choking shoegaze and suffocating, grunge-dripping riffs. GakEater is their new single, clocking in at 7 minutes – there’s heavy references to a crooked government, snorting fat lines of coke and being utterly despicable.
From the opening minute of tranquility and the whispered lyrics, “You can feel him on your chest/Weighing heavy on your soul. There’s a devil in this place/I can feel him taking hold” everything has a feel of calm and serenity. This is soon shattered as that ever-expanding, claustrophobic, smothering noise of the guitars hits the speakers. The droning, doom-laden lingering notes that hang in the air on this chew away at everything else, until that’s all you can hear; it spreads like a virus, consuming with this noxious vapor. What is going on here? These Bristol lads are drawing on elements of Deftones certainly, laced with the moody, brooding heaviness of bong-water doom-metallers High on Fire or even Sleep with the space-rock elements of Satellite Years-era Hopesfall.
More credit to the earth-rending riffs near the end on this, they belch, scream and bulldoze with this overwhelming fury and sneering disgust and sound fucking massive on a decent set of headphones. This is crushing, nasty and harrowing noise-rock fed through the weirdness filter and splattered into your ears. Honestly, you’ll keep wanting to listen to this over and over again, absolutely huge-sounding, caustic and grotesquely amusing, Sugar Horse deserve your attention. I would dearly love an album of this, just to see how weird and wonderful they can go.
Buy/listen/experience/sniff glue to more of Sugar Horse’s ridiculous output via the Invisible Lama shop or on bandcamp.
Links
Sugar Horse
Sugar Horse on Twitter
Sugar Horse Instagram
Sugar Horse YouTube
Lizard Hips
Junior Vice President of Keep It Fast. In other news: I work in social media, talk about dinosaurs, run a book club and have amazing facial hair. I am also a male man who is still not dead.
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