There’s something deeply satisfying when a record rolls in and just refuses to sit neatly on your shelf. SHEEV’s Ate’s Alchemist is that kind of beast – the kind that claws at you in your sleep and smells faintly of burnt incense, crushed amps, and regret. You try to file it under stoner, prog, or metal, but it keeps slipping through your fingers, grinning the whole way down.
The Berlin-based four-piece has been kicking around since 2017, and while their debut Mind Conductor turned plenty of heads in the doom/stoner underworld, this new one doesn’t just turn heads – it lops them off and mounts them on a spiraling riff altar. This isn’t just a second album, it’s a full-blown transformation. A concept record, yeah – about Ate, Greek goddess of chaos and delusion – but don’t let the mythos fool you into expecting a prog-rock book report. This thing moves. It burns. It seethes.
There’s no real center to the sound, and that’s what makes it hit so hard. You get that woozy stoner pull, for sure – big, heavy-bottomed riffs that swing like a slow-motion hammer fight. But they’re tangled up with some gnarly polyrhythmic weirdness, tight as hell but never smug about it. One minute you’re nodding along like a satisfied Sabbath worshipper, and the next you’re sucked into a spiraling prog hole that smells like early Opeth but feels more feral, less precious.
Vocally, Nitzan doesn’t play the metal frontman card. There’s melody, yeah, but it’s weary, haunted, cracked in the right spots – like someone singing to keep the shadows back. That humanity cuts through all the precision, and it’s a big reason the album feels lived-in rather than calculated. Joshan’s bass lumbers and groans like tectonic plates grinding against each other, while Phil’s drumming walks that fine line between mathy and primal – somehow both locked-in and falling apart at the same time. Songwut’s guitar licks are the glue and the fire.
The production helps too. With Bottrill (Tool, Mastodon) at the helm and Karl Daniel Lidén polishing it off, it sounds massive but never sterile. There’s grime in the gears, and that’s important. It’s easy to over-polish records like this until they sound like robots playing riffs in a vacuum. Not here. This thing breathes, snarls, and bleeds.
What’s wild is that it never loses the thread. This is a concept record, yeah, and you can chase the through-line if you want – this Alchemist dude forging demons for Ate and letting them loose into the world – but you don’t need to. The mood does all the talking. Every song feels like a different descent: into fire, into fear, into whatever shape your personal madness takes when the lights go out and your walls start whispering.
The best part? It doesn’t care if you get it. It just is. There’s no “please like us” energy, no desperate trend-chasing. Just four musicians dragging a deeply personal, chaotic vision into the daylight and daring you to deal with it.
You can call it stoner metal if you want. Or prog sludge. Or psych-grunge-whatever. But none of those fit, really. Ate’s Alchemist is a thing unto itself – weird, unshapely, a bit unhinged – and that’s exactly what makes it great. It’s the sound of a band leaning fully into their own weirdness, and dragging you with them whether you’re ready or not.
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Released by Ripple Music on July 11th, 2025
