Tag Archives: desert rock

YAWNING BALCH – Volume Four

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With its bright sounding guitar lines and prominent bass groove, ‘Pyramid of Djoser’, the lead track from Yawning Balch’s fourth opus, opens a little more forcefully than you’d possibly expect from a typical Yawning Balch recording. In many ways, its busier feel, evident even from its first few bars, comes closer to sounding more like a Yawning Man leftover. This doesn’t make it in any way bad, of course: for desert rock fans, the immediacy with which the quartet hit a rocky groove here creates something striking; something which, stylistically, sits at the pinnacle of desert rock coolness.

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TEN EAST / SOFTSUN – Turned To Stone: Chapter 10 (Split Release)

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Within the first two years of their existence, SoftSun – a project featuring Yawning Man’s Gary Arce and Superlynx’s Pia Isaksen – released two absolutely top notch albums. Both ‘Daylight In The Dark’ (2024) and ‘Eternal Sunrise’ (2025) shared a near perfect blend of deep psych and desert rock, with Arce’s atmospheric riffs proving a perfect match for Pia’s ethereal vocal style. No doubt about it: these records showcased one of the greatest bands to emerge on the desert rock/stoner scene for quite some time.

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WEEDPECKER – V

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This fifth album from Polish deep psych merchants Weedpecker had a long gestation period. The material started taking shape in 2023, and the original demos had all been recorded by the end of that year. With so much doom, sludge and deep psych taking on a raw, live in the studio feel, you might wonder how different the material sounded back then, since ‘V’ didn’t actually reach the public until the beginning of 2026, but no matter what changes were made in the interim, the record sounds superb.

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LORD ELEPHANT – Ultra Soul

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Occasionally, a band name is all you need to gauge what something probably sounds like. Truckfighters and Acid Mammoth are two great examples. Here’s another: Lord Elephant create an absolutely huge sound throughout their second album ‘Ultra Soul’. The record’s seven instrumental numbers often find the Italian band in a weighty frame of mind, bringing a world of riffs that blend doom, stoner metal and deep psych in a way that invites favourable comparisons with Earthless and Karma To Burn, as well as drawing influence from the instrumental elements of Down and Eyehategod – only making those influences feel more intense.

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Watch: SoftSun share new video clip for ‘Anywhere But Here’

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During the last quarter of 2025, desert rock duo ‘SoftSun’ released their second album ‘Eternal Sunrise’. Since their debut LP was a near flawless slice of deep psych infused desert/stoner, there was a great deal riding on ‘Eternal Sunrise’ in terms of overall quality, but it’s fair to say that it was everything fans of the debut could’ve hoped for.

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