Eagle Twin - The Thundering Heard (Southern Lord) 2018
9
There are heavy albums, and then there are those that seem to originate from a place of such density and leaden weight that they scarcely seem earthly. The Thundering Heard is one of those rare beasts, a plodding leviathan that eats pure doom and excretes distortion while trampling the line between ritualistic amp-worship and the kind of sleek, blues-tinged guitarwork that has existed as long as metal has. It’s also a genuinely unsettling album, not least because of Gentry Densley’s hypnotic growl and insistent, serpentine riffing, but also the sheer power that it repeatedly pulls out of the ether. If there was ever an album to have encroached upon Dopesmoker’s gargantuan weight, this is it.