Lunng, the third solo full‑length from British sound artist, composer and engineer Sam Slater, is a record built on friction. Loaded with tension and anchored by stark textural and stylistic contrasts, it finds Slater confronting the split in his own practice: the collision between a lifetime of bands and DIY recording on one hand, and his later life as a sought‑after, highly disciplined composer for film and television on the other. After years spent helping to realise a director’s vision - from his early work with Jóhann Jóhannsson to his collaborations with Hildur Guðnadóttir on the Grammy‑winning scores for Joker and Chernobyl, and more recently with Pulitzer Prize‑winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov on 2000 Meters to Andriivka - Slater found his own musical voice increasingly threaded through other people’s narratives. On Lunng, he turns back to the unruly range of music that formed him and refuses to smooth the edges, using those extremes as the raw material for a singular, volatile language.

You can hear this manifesto from the opening track, “Heatsick.” On paper, its premise borders on absurd: an extravagant fusion of early‑2000s drone metal and vintage British brass band music, in which ear‑splitting overdriven guitars and blown‑out choral vocals crash into the solemn glow of trombone swells performed by veteran brass explorer Hilary Jeffery. In practice, Slater’s meticulous sense of intention conducts these elements into a surreal, coherent blur. The guitars’ harshness gets diffused by Jeffery’s eerie colliery echoes, which carry memories of mining‑town bands and processional hymnals, while the brass lines make the distortion feel less like aggression and more like pressure - a weight of history pushing through a wall of sound.