Stone Machine Electric don’t play songs so much as drop you inside them. Faces is six slabs of slow-burn hypnosis, the kind of record that doesn’t hurry to prove a damn thing. These Texans have been circling the underground for years, and you can hear the road miles baked into every stretch of feedback and thump. It’s not about perfection; it’s about mood, tension, and the kind of groove that makes you forget what time it is.
The riffs are thick but not claustrophobic. They roll forward like heat mirages, sometimes wobbling, sometimes breaking open into spacey trails that feel more like weather than music. Drums don’t crack down hard; they mark the pulse, like a heart beating slower than it should. And now with Paxecko on bass, the whole machine has more bottom end – something swampy and unsettling, like standing ankle-deep in dark water.
What’s memorable is the atmosphere. Doom records often come loaded with fake menace or cartoonish sludge. Faces dodges all that. It’s heavier in a stranger way: immersive, slightly narcotic, sometimes even tender, before it drags you back under. You can put it on loud and get flattened, or let it ride in the background and find yourself drifting out of focus. Either way, it gets in.
This isn’t a new band trying to chase a scene. Stone Machine Electric sounds like they’ve made peace with their own orbit. After more than a decade of building this thing, Faces feels like a crystallization. Not flashy, not overcooked – just a raw document of where the trio are now. A little ragged, a little mysterious, and totally their own.
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Released by Argonauta Records on September 26th, 2025
Music source for review – Grand Sounds PR
