SUMAC The Healer: Healing Through Eardrum Annihilation

SUMAC is not a band you casually put on in the background while doing the dishes, unless you want those dishes to spontaneously shatter. Fronted by Aaron Turner (of ISIS and Old Man Gloom fame), SUMAC bridges the gap between post-metal, sludge metal, and avant-garde metal. This means you get the sprawling, atmospheric crescendos of post-metal, the thick, abrasive, downtuned misery of sludge, and the unpredictable, rule-breaking song structures of avant-garde metal.

Their latest offering, The Healer, is a towering achievement in punishing your ears to save your soul.

The Concept

According to the band, the album’s complex interpolation of melody, drone, improvisation, and riffing represents “narratives of experiential wounding as gateways to empowerment and evolution.” In normal human speak? This album sounds like being thrown down a rocky mountain, surviving, and suddenly realizing you have a newfound appreciation for life, empathy, and love. It’s dismal and subterranean at first, but its core message is an unwavering determination to embrace existence.

So, yes, it’s a healing journey. Just one that sounds like the apocalypse.

World of Light

Silence, long held in shuttered cities. Landscape pocked with bodies. Stale breath hovers. Piled high under common eye the naked dead flow. A stream uninterrupted in light of day. Rats stir, quiver under sun’s unbidden pallor. Oh, muted hearts through clasped hands glimmer. Shine! Shine!

Steps falter in halls long emptied. Dull gaze glistens through shadowed cracks. Mask broken.

Blood, across all shores, twined.

By the fall, all are joined. Through red cloud’s haze, finger’s reach is met. All are joined. All are joined.

Sight regained. In rooms now illumed by fire’s shine. Swaying mass, by hymns restored. Up the luminous steps, arisen from the ash they ascend. Up! Up! Ascend!

By shards of sun scattered, through dome hung with leaves, are anointed bowed heads, in this world of light.

World of Light sets the tone of the record immediately. It kicks off with a vivid picture of desolation and mass destruction. But amidst the “landscape pocked with bodies,” there’s a flicker of life—a glimmer through clasped hands. Musically, the track wades through abrasive dissonance before pulling you up from the ashes, reflecting the lyrical climb towards the light. It’s an exhausting, yet strangely uplifting 25-minute hike out of the abyss.

Yellow Dawn

Eyes open to yellow dawn. Words uncoil. Strength summoned to utter reclamation. Land, sea, air and sky, all splendors of heaven and earth.

Keeper’s tongue refutes a churning unheard refrain.

Up from the bed awash in blood. Up stairs of stone into light of day. Wailing from below pealing out dissolves in warmth of dust and sun.

Arms reach. Hands grasp. Lungs fill. Open eyes.

Awake! Rejoice! Body reclaimed. Spirit carried by starlit waves in heaven’s hands.

The awakening. Yellow Dawn embodies the physical and spiritual struggle to rise from trauma. Lyrically, it is about pulling yourself from a bed “awash in blood” and finally taking a breath in the warm sun. The music mirrors this tension, clashing chaotic drumming with huge, heaving riffs that make you feel the physical weight of gravity trying to pull you back down. Yet, the song triumphs, ending on a note of utter reclamation and survival.

New Rites

Grey plains crossed, dry and cracked. Neck craned leading to springs infinite, seen from chasms shade.

Lead press of the keeper’s weight. Breath drawn short, lungs briar pricked. Over ground steps weave and recede.

Under boughs of the pine, our hearts undone.

New rites from ancient blades to dispel the curdled blood laid across the place by waters ringed.

Under boughs of the pine, our hearts conjoined.

No sorrow. Only strength.

Through space, in tumult, mind carried. Thought obscured. Inlets to flowering expanse. Colors shift into forms unknown. Perfumed confusion, stuttered sound. Heaving fields. Honeyed sores.

From flesh and fallow limbs, petals open.

New Rites transitions from mere survival to active healing. The lyrics guide us through a dry, cracked emotional wasteland towards an infinite spring. There’s a ritualistic shedding of past trauma (“to dispel the curdled blood”) leading to a state of profound connection: “Our hearts conjoined / No sorrow / Only strength.” SUMAC’s improvisational prowess really shines here; the track morphs continuously, capturing the confusing, shifting nature of finding peace after chaos.

The Stone’s Turn

From father’s palm crude stone is flung. Its rippling arc, a violent quake in the air. Oh, how it flies, vengeful and without mercy.

Mercy! Mercy!

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Upon the pages turn. Falling flecks, blood succession from the stone’s turn. Through the years it tears.

The stone turns.

Through two hearts, a spear.

Wet flesh together pressed. Of angry sun’s surging pulse is shared. For Phaeton, Apollo burns.

Through two hearts, a spear. The worm’s howl echoes through the years, gorged upon our spirits.

By swallowed tears, the stone now dissolved.

Now hands may rest on gentle skin. Held.

Weakness splayed open. Caressing offal tender. Licked by golden flame, we are remade.

The album closer, The Stone’s Turn, tackles the cyclical nature of trauma and violence—how a “crude stone” flung by a father ripples through generations. However, the track (and the album) doesn’t end in despair. Through the endurance of pain and the shedding of tears, the “stone is now dissolved.” It ends on an intimate, almost tender note of deep vulnerability and rebirth: “Licked by golden flame / We are remade.” Musically, it’s a colossal, sprawling epic that dismantles everything built over the past hour, leaving you emotionally exhausted but profoundly renewed.

Verdict

The Healer is not for the faint of heart. It is a grueling, complex, and overwhelmingly heavy record. However, if you are willing to let Aaron Turner and company drag you through the darkest corners of sludge and avant-garde metal, you’ll find a surprisingly hopeful and deeply empathetic message at its core. It’s the musical equivalent of primal scream therapy: terrifying to witness, but incredibly healthy in the long run.