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 out, we’ve got a number with retro post punk leanings, a catchy piece of garage pop, a huge and jangly workout that falls between garage rock and melodic punk, something insanely heavy, and more besides… As always, we hope you find something new to enjoy.
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On their 2019 LP, ‘Ode To Oblivion’, Oreyeon delivered a set of songs driven by absolutely crushing riffs. Blending the stoner/fuzz of classic Kyuss into a doomier musical landscape, the record’s best songs were unrelentingly heavy, and yet a world of vocal filters and other tricks sometimes gave their sound a deep psych edge which kept things interesting. Over the next few years, Oreyeon would become an important fixture within the Italian doom and sludge scenes. By the time they recorded ‘Equations For The Useless’ in 2022, a much bigger recording budget gave them a slightly clearer sound, but without making their material especially more accessible. If anything, it cemented the band’s reputation as one of Europe’s finest underground metal bands.
‘Mammoth’s Tundra’, the current single from Sun Below, first began life in 2023, before going through “significant changes” to wind up being the massive behemoth that kicks off the band’s 2025. The opening riff shares a slow, classic doom sound, instantly advertising the band’s heavy feel. After several bars, maybe at the point you’d expect a vocal to appear or the riff to do something dramatically different, Sun Below merely choose to heavy everything, whilst simultaneously slowing down to a sludgy crawl. The appearance of a vocal lends something Melvins-esque, before the doomy vibes slide into a slightly more melodic blues-doom sound, by which time, you’re either completely behind the band, or not. Working a Sabbath-on-steroids groove, the combo of drums and guitar latch onto an even deeper brand of doom, before the sludge comes back for a second assault.
When a band is pitched as “death metal”, there are certain tropes that the listener will expect. There are the pnrumatic drums – an integral part of the death metal sound, from the genre’s formative years, due to the brutal assault of bands like Suffocation – and the guttural vocals, often associated with the genre’s bigger names like Death and Entombed. You’d probably also expect to hear speed driven, huge sounding bass grinds, often providing a pivotal aspect to the aural assault.
Croatian band In Dakhma’s debut album ‘He Who Sows The Ground’ features all of that…and more. Check out ‘Sacrum’ and you’ll find a classic death metal sound delivered with a genuine enthusiasm; listen to ‘In Dogma’ and you’ll discover a hardcore infused bass part colliding with thrash riffs that are direct descendants from Sepultura’s massively influential ‘Arise’. Elsewhere, ‘Lies Beyond The Golden Ruins’ colours the band’s riffs with a hard nod towards groove metal, and the epic closer ‘Tower of Silence’ introduces sludgy riffs to bring something even heavier to the fore.
On their full length release ‘Mourning Asteri’ from 2022, Negative Thirteen tapped into a brilliantly heavy sound. The bulk of the material fused classic doom metal riffs with a sludgy aesthetic which resulted in a well orchestrated, uncompromising record. Unlike some doom-sludge acts, though, the album flaunted a brilliant production job which placed as much interest on the bass as the sledgehammer guitar parts. It could be argued that the material often valued massive riffs over any kind of immediacy, but there was no doubt that this band meant business.
Their 2025 follow up, ‘Recover What You Can’ is often just as heavy, but with a couple of tracks favouring an epic length allowing the doomy band more room for manouevre, it sometimes feels as if Negative Thirteen haven’t so much “branched out”, but descended even more deeply into their own world of sludge derived sounds.