Here’s a real treat from the Ripple Music label. SoftSun are a doom-laden shoegaze/desert rock trio featuring a few familiar faces. Guitarist Gary Arce will be familiar to some as a member of both Yawning Man and Yawning Balch; vocalist Pia Isaksen is a member of Superlynx, and drummer Dan Joeright is a member of Earth Moon Earth. Between them, they’ve created something that sounds almost nothing like their parent acts, immediately making SoftSun an effective side hustle.

On their current single ‘Daylight In The Dark’, there are faint echoes of SuperLynx’s doomy sound, but not much more than that to link this to Pia’s other band. The slow tempo here works a huge bass sound very effectively, giving this track a huge amount of muscle, despite its desire to not attack the listener immediately. Instead, the atmospheric trio spend seven minutes laying down a slow blanket of sound, which eventually culminates in Arce weaving a world of reverbed lead guitar, feeding an almost shoegaze-ish layer of noise into the funereal desert-based groove.

This doomy fuzz rock creates the perfect vehicle for a heavy, echoed vocal which shares the lyric almost as if it were designed to be extra instrumentation. Isaksen sounds very comfortable behind a wall of effects, seemingly very much knowing that at times, her and Arce’s contributions are in danger of bleeding into each other, but this relative lack of separation only serves the band further in the way it creates even more of an otherworldly atmosphere. The mood of the track barely changes throughout the duration; it sets a tone, layers that with extra noise, and eventually works a hypnotic groove that shares a very dark take on a desert rock sound, taking Arce’s distinctive tone into a world of post rock that could prove to be far more enduring than his work with Yawning Balch.

Take a listen below.