Sunn O)))

Oxblood vinyls. Nearly three decades into an activity that has consistently redefined the outer territories of heavy music, Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson return with their tenth album - their first for Sub Pop, and the first to bear their own name.

Recorded in January 2025 at Bear Creek Studios in Woodinville, Washington, co-produced and mixed alongside Brad Wood, sunn O))) finds the duo stripping the project back to its irreducible core. For the first time, all instrumentation was performed exclusively by O'Malley and Anderson - no collaborators, no guests. The result is not a contraction but an expansion: a crucible in which nearly thirty years of accumulated practice distils into something rawer and more focused than anything they have previously committed to tape.

Six compositions, sprawling across nearly eighty minutes of vinyl. The arboreal setting of Bear Creek - vast windows, Pacific Northwest forest, the sound of water - seeps into the music itself, most literally in the field recordings that surface beneath the crushing low-end of XXANN and Mindrolling, and in the introduction of piano into Glory Black, lending an unexpected hush to the album's closing passages. The interplay between the two - after decades of performance together, now working without the triangulation of other voices - achieves a telepathic intensity that feels genuinely new.

The album arrives in a package that matches the ambition of its contents. Two paintings by the late Mark Rothko, reproduced with the permission of his estate, frame the sleeves - one per side, reversed for UK and European pressings. Liner notes are contributed by Robert Macfarlane, whose writing on landscape and the relationship between humanity and nature finds an unlikely but precise counterpart in the glacial, earth-moving sonics of sunn O))). Illustrations by Elodie Lesourd appear on the inner sleeves.