You ever wake up with your teeth humming from feedback? That’s where this album lives. III doesn’t give you songs, it gives you weight. Not the sort of weight that bands in leather jackets try to conjure in overpriced studios. I’m talking about the tectonic, low-slung, slow-crawling kind—born from the pit, not the playlist.
THAMMUZ aren’t newcomers anymore, but they still sound like a band that never left the garage. That’s a compliment. You don’t feel calculation here. This isn’t an “evolution” album. It’s a survival album. Speakers pushed until they whimper, vocals that feel shouted more than sung, riffs that drag their knuckles like they’ve been walking through the desert for weeks looking for water and only finding smoke.
The whole thing plays like it was recorded at midnight with every light off and the amps sweating. You get moments that feel accidental – in the best way. Feedback trails that weren’t cleaned up, cymbal crashes that hit a hair too late. These are not flaws. These are the gods of heavy music nodding their approval.
What’s fascinating is how III manages to sound massive without posturing. There’s a lot of restraint under the distortion. No stadium choruses. No “look at me” solos. Just repetition. Repetition like mantra. Like ritual. A riff gets hammered into your skull until you’re not thinking about it anymore – you are it. The trance is the point.
They pull from the usual holy texts – Sabbath, Kyuss, the slow-burn end of grunge – but they do it like people who’ve lived those records, not studied them. You hear that in the tones: burnt, dry, broken in. The band isn’t afraid to just let things ride. Let the fuzz breathe. Let the weight hang. There’s patience here that a lot of bands fake with “atmosphere.” THAMMUZ don’t add reverb and hope. They trust the riff.
It’s also ugly in all the right ways. No gloss. No ProTools shine. It sounds like four dudes playing loud in a small room, which is exactly how it should sound. Anything cleaner would ruin it. You can hear the room. You can almost smell it – cables and sweat and stale air.
This is heavy music that doesn’t try to be heavy. It just is. There’s no climax because the whole record sits inside the moment. Like being stuck in a slow, endless wave that never quite crashes but never lets you breathe either. It’s doom. It’s stoner. It’s sludge. But who cares what we call it?
III isn’t for genre tags. It’s for the 2 a.m. drive. For lighting a cigarette off a dying tube amp. For the crackle of an overloaded speaker just before it dies. It’s not background music. It’s a black hole of a record, and if you’re lucky, you don’t come back out.
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Released by Argonauta Records on May 9, 2025
Music source for review – Grand Sounds PR
