Sugar Horse - Not a Sound in Heaven (2026)

The messy and chaotic mix of nugaze, pop, post-metal and pure anger that boils with energy and noise! Yes, the Brits of Sugar Horse are back! The third album came quite soon after the last one and I couldn't be happier as it's exactly what I love in this Machine Girl meets Nothing project. It just makes me jump around, even on this grey and melancholic day.

Although they still call themselves "a decidedly average band", they don't fool anyone anymore. Three albums in and it's still a fresh and exciting take on modern noise music. Short phrases for short attention spin suffering audience, tons of shifts in paces and melodies, angry screaming being a neighbour of soft, atmospheric choruses. And it's all put together and melt into a perfect modern album that calls extreme eclecticism being "decidedly average". This blend is a mesmerizing one indeed.

It's only fitting that the lyrics here are slightly poetic but very timely comments on the reality around us. The reality that is equally chaotic and messy but also way less appealing. "Brought to heel/Trained not to feel" in Secret Speech and "Keep the market free/And if it bleeds/We can kill it for you" in Fire Graphics being only two examples of the poignant and not-so-fun-at-all themes on the album .Sugar Horse, the missing horseman of the Apocalypse.

Not a Sound in Heaven costs 6 EUR (5 GBP).

Check: Secret Speech

Country: UK

Genre: chaotic modern shoegaze

Label: Fat Dracula Records

Sugar Horse - The Live Long After (2021)

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Sugar Horse - The Live Long After (2021)

They call themselves "decidedly average" and playing "monotonous rock" and it does sound a bit fishy for me as their sound is far from being average, that's for sure. The Bristol-based band, throughout several years, released three EPs while getting ready to showing their LP debut. This finally happened at the end of August and I must say, the new album The Live Long After struck me with its sound.

I adore how loud their music feels. Thanks to the dispersed quality of the vocals and screams, the guitars seem to be even louder, so that the audience feels the noise in the whole bodies, every bone vibrates each time the music goes up. And it does it a lot - there's quite a lot of quieter parts where the clean vocals or even basses are put in the spotlight, only to get consumed by the rabid guitars sooner than later. This comes from various inspirations the band admits to having: from shoegaze to doom metal to stoner music, every one of them seems to be audible on this album. The quality of the noise is particularly impressive in the first songs of the album (after I Am Not Now - "an anti-hymn based on an ancient Byzantine chant" serving as an intro) with Shouting Judas at Bob Dylan being my personal number one. 

There are also ballads here and I find them a bit less exciting. However, they represent the band's modus operandi, as the artists create things in slower pace, or, as they call it themselves, they "have a complete disregard for urgency", not to mention that even the slowest ballads here have to drown within the lovely ocean of noise eventually.

The Live Long After costs 7.5 EUR (12 AUD).

Check: Shouting Judas at Bob Dylan

Country: UK

Genre: noisy post-metal

Label: Small Pond Records/Art As Catharsis

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