Black Helium: New Album Um Available to Preorder; Out March 3
I’ve only just begun to dig into Black Helium‘s third album, Um, and I note that because there’s an awful lot to dig into in the 45 minutes of the London space-psych rockers’ follow-up to 2020’s The Wholly Other (review here), but already it’s striking in its meld of sprawl and impact, float and heft. The band have been freaked out all the while — they made their debut in 2018 with the attention-grabbing confrontational Primitive Fuck (review here) — and they’ve done nothing over the last five years so much as expand their sound to become more encompassing. Um, with its indicative-of-the-sound color-blast cover art, at very least continues the thread of blown-out cosmic heavy. As I said, I’ve been through it a couple times, but just enough to tell me I need to hear it more to get anything close to a real sense of its personality as compared to the two prior LPs, but it’s one I’m very much looking forward to knowing better.
If you’re not hip to these cats or their work to this point, don’t think of it as a barrier to entry that this is their third record. They’re streaming the track “Summer of Hair” below and whether you know them or not, my friendly suggestion is to, if you’re still reading any of this, to dig in, understand that it doesn’t necessarily account for everything on Um from which it comes, and just enjoy it. This band has been kind of underrated at this point in terms of hype within the heavy underground, but as “Summer of Hair” reaffirms, that’s certainly no fault of their craft itself.
Art and preorder links from their social media:
We’re over the moon to announce that our new album, Um, is available for preorder from Riot Season Records.
riotseasonrecords.bandcamp.com
Limited edition purple vinyl LP, with download code, black polylined inner bag, hype sticker and decent poly outer bag to keep all it’s goodness free from harm.
‘London based psych rockers ‘Black Helium’ release their third album ‘Um’, and take things even further…
Here we find psychedelic defiance at its most incendiary and joyous!
Returning to record at Bear Bites Horse Studio with Wayne Adams; Beck Harvey, Diogo Gomes and Stuart Gray deep dive into lysergic rock primitivism, sparking sprawling stream-of-thought explorations to bring about an album that is as fried as it is alive’
Tracklisting:
1. Another Heaven
2. I Saw God
3. Dungeon Head
4. Summer Of Hair
5. The Keys To Red Skeleton’s House (I Open The Door)
https://www.facebook.com/blackhelium
https://blackheliumband.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/blackheliumband
http://www.riotseason.com
https://riotseasonrecords.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/riotseasonrecords
