Into The Music
Sunn O))) releases their self-titled album on April 3, which gives a useful entry point for thinking about drone and ambient metal, the corner of music where the riff slows down until it stops being a riff and starts being something else entirely.
The band, Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, have been making records since 1998, and they named themselves after the Sunn amplifier brand because the name conveyed exactly what they wanted: huge, sustained, low-frequency sound. Their records are designed for physical experience. The bass frequencies register in the body before they register in the ears.
Drone music has a longer history than its association with heavy metal suggests. La Monte Young was making music built on sustained tones in the early 1960s, and the influence of Indian classical music, particularly the raga tradition’s relationship to extended duration and a tonal center, runs through a lot of what later became drone. Sunn O))) sits at the intersection of that experimental tradition and doom metal, inheriting the slowness and the heaviness of Black Sabbath while pushing it toward abstraction.
What drone music does that most other music doesn’t: it asks you to notice duration itself. A three-minute pop song moves through enough distinct moments that time becomes invisible. A 20-minute drone piece makes you conscious of every minute passing. That temporal experience is different from anything the standard song structure can produce, and it’s why listeners who get into it tend to talk about it in terms that sound more like meditation practice than rock criticism.
Sunn O)))’s collaborations with vocalists like Attila Csihar and Scott Walker have added a human element that deepens the eeriness rather than grounding it. Their 2019 album Life Metal, produced by Steve O’Malley and Steve Wilson, was one of the more accessible entries in their catalogue. The self-titled record coming Friday may be their most uncompromising yet, or something else entirely. With Sunn O))), the direction is never entirely predictable.
I’ll grant that Sunn O))) are doing something interesting, but let’s not pretend drone metal invented the concept of sustained tones and meditative repetition. Have any of these people actually listened to Amon Düül II or early Tangerine Dream? The patient deconstruction of form was already being done with more compositional rigor in 1972 than anything coming out of the metal world decades later. The distortion is atmospheric wallpaper. Change my mind.
Okay I came to this article knowing almost nothing about drone metal and I genuinely learned something. The framing around Sunn O)))’s self-titled as an entry point is smart , it gives listeners something anchored before you start explaining the whole lineage. I think what surprises me most is that this genre asks for a completely different kind of listening attention than anything else I follow. With Taylor’s music or the folk stuff I love, I’m tracking lyrics, structure, progression. Drone metal is almost the opposite , you have to let go of those habits entirely. That’s not a criticism, that’s actually fascinating to me. It’s music that requires you to stop expecting things.