Album Review: Black Helium, The Animals Are Coming
I’ve yet to hear a Black Helium release that didn’t make me think the psychedelic revolution wasn’t right around the corner. From 2018’s Primitive Fuck (review here) right on through to The Animals Are Coming. Like, oh wow man, this is too cool. No way people won’t catch onto this and lose their minds. Etc. I take it as emblematic of the exceptional nature of the band, their continual and continually successful chase toward individuality in their approach, their willingness to freak out, and the fact that while they’re nothing if not dug into the traditions of psychedelia and heavy psych rock as the six-song The Animals Are Coming lays in a course for your cerebral cortex with the lengthy jam that brings 10-minute closer “Inside the Horror Mask” to its culmination, their sound manages to come across as refreshing each time out because they make the going in their songs — long or short — a journey worth undertaking.
Last heard from with 2023’s Um (review here), Black Helium are the London three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Stuart Gray, bassist/vocalist Beck Harvey and drummer Diogo Gomes, and The Animals Are Coming was tracked about a year ago with Ben Turner at Axe and Trap Studios. Needless to say, dust is not an issue for the year the 43-minute long-player sat prior to meeting the sunlight of which parts of it seem to have been made. The album begins with its longest song (immediate points) in the casually drifting early vibery of “Return the Curse” (11:45), which drops its title line often in the mellow/melodic intro but gives over after its first minute to desert-hued crunch-riffed tonality, a terrestrial touchdown that cycles through measures and finds even stronger footing for additional tonal weight before the ‘gazing vocals return and bring human presence to the shove and build underway. At this point, The Animals Are Coming has been on for fewer than three minutes, but the band are wasting no time in teaching their listenership how to read the album, to expect turns like this, and letting anyone within earshot — which, if given the appropriate amount of volume, could include a fair amount of hu-mans — know that there’s a sense of control beneath all that unbridled freakout and blown fuses.
In preface to the finale, “Return the Curse” also departs its structure in favor of a noisy jam, and the freedom cast into the ether circa seven and a half minutes in can’t be faked. It’s not that Black Helium are working against genre, but they’re pointedly open-minded about what constitutes a song and the devolution of “Return the Curse” and the willfully all-in push of “Inside the Horror Mask” into residual guitar and cosmic noise are emblematic of that. They’re not, however, the only instances of it on the record, since dividing the two bookends are four tracks, alternatingly six and four minutes each, from the parade of effects, thud and roll and just-because-it’s-a-shorter-song-doesn’t-mean-it-can’t-have-a-big-payoff of “Saviour Destroyer” through the krautier instrumental exploration of “Worm Vision” with either keys or guitar or some kind of voicebox accompanying later in the procession and Gomes double-timing on the hi-hat for extra funk, and “They Have Bodies” with its fuzz-meets-psych texturizing, a vocal from Harvey echoing overtop a tense riff set in the open space of the mix. The vocals there might put one in mind of Sera Timms, but the movement behind is more classically lysergic, and though it gets danceable too, the repeated title line — again, an element introduced by “Return the Curse” — ensures that the start of side B is in conversation with what Black Helium have already laid out.
The culmination of this stretch, then, is in “Up on a Hill,” which finds its own niche in a modern-feeling psychedelia, resonant in its melody, the patient tone of its vocals and the active-but-not-overbearing rhythm that accompanies, prescient to the heavier unfolding that starts at about 2:40. Black Helium have played with varying notions of density all along, whether that’s departing verses and choruses for a plunge into the aural unknown on “Return the Curse” or finding a poppier post-rock bent in “They Have Bodies,” but with “Up on a Hill,” it’s clearly just time to push a riff, and that’s exactly what the song does. The chorus that ensues is accordingly effective in conveying a sense of crescendo for the proceedings up to that point, but the band don’t go so far out quite yet as to forget their purpose. “Up on a Hill” turns back from the precipice where it otherwise might leap into the void as Black Helium do on the more extended pieces here, which highlights the consciousness underpinning the decisions made both in presentation and craft when it comes to The Animals Are Coming.
If the band are positing themselves as ‘the animals’ in question, that’s not to say they’re unthinking in their work, just that the results are wild, which is fair enough. “Inside the Horror Mask” basks in its swirl and slower-tempo fluidity early and grows brighter as it proceeds through its middle, already by then underway on the last time-to-go instrumentalist voyage the trio will take on. That shimmer becomes blinding eventually in Gray‘s guitar, but Harvey, Gomes and the backing wash of effects/synth/whatever are all there too and everybody collectively holds it together. There’s a plot to it, even if the plot is the blowout. Still counts. And Black Helium don’t waste that last opportunity to revel in some brainmelting, taking advantage of the chance as they have all along while creating and overarching flow through individual tracks united in no small part by their unwillingness to bend to the limits of genre. As Black Helium approach maturity as a group, their fourth long-player brims with the confidence of a band who know what they want their songs to do, but who are nonetheless committed to finding new ideas to incorporate into their modus and growing as artists. Thus The Animals Are Coming is the best of both worlds, plus more than a bit of galaxial adventuring for the discerning weirdo, and Black Helium remain a better band than the underground knows or appreciates.
Black Helium, The Animals Are Coming (2025)
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