STEAK – Steak

Steak’s ‘Acute Mania’ (released via Ripple Music in 2022) presented a brilliant dose of stoner rock. Just as important as sharing some great riffs, the album boasted the kind of production job that made the London based heavyweights sound even heavier. The guitars adopted a tone somewhere between doomy and fuzzy – often making the band’s Kyuss influenced roots more than obvious – and the drums punched through everything with a genuine intent. In stoner terms, it offered the kind of professional sound you’d expect from a major label band a quarter of a century earlier. In short, ‘Acute Mania’ was a contemporary stoner classic.

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THE REAL GONE SINGLES BAR #169

Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the more interesting individual tracks that have landed in our inbox over the past few weeks. This time around, we’re pleased to share a piece of retro pop, a great track from an up and coming singer songwriter, a slab of ambient desert rock, and more besides. As always, we hope you find something new to enjoy!

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YAWNING BALCH – Volume Four

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)

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

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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