Clayton Burgess, New Mexican Doom Cult, Lammping, Mos Eisley Spaceport, Dome Runner, Basaltic Plateau, Gjenferd, Codex Serafini, Sunbreather, Konung
Posted in Reviews on March 18th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
Feel like we’re really getting into it now, and that’s a good thing. I’m not saying I was shaking off rust for the first two days, but I look at the spread of styles across the names above and ‘it’s gonna be a good day’ pops inexorably into my head. I like that feeling, which I guess is how we get here in the first place.
It’s Wednesday of this seven-day QR, so we’re not quite halfway through yet. If you’ve been keeping up, thank you. If not, it’s okay. You’re still welcome to peruse the below and hopefully find something that speaks to you.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
Clayton Burgess, If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now
Self-recorded and just as raw as the day is long, the first solo album from Clayton Burgess (Satan’s Satyrs founder, also ex-Electric Wizard), If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now, is so classic in its substance it can’t help be modern. And I’m not talking about the pop garage indie of the 2000s, like it sounds cheap but also everybody has perfect hair. Songs like “Kerosene” and the Mellotron-laced “Meadowlands” are more in the Rise Above Records mindset of retroism, which is to say doing the thing for real and letting the genres sort themselves out later. Thus the proto-punk of “Little Bat Dreams” and the strut of “Scenic Byway” coexist with the jazzy “Faustine,” and so on. “Signal Fire” and the closer “Golden Age of Volcanism” are a bit darker, maybe a little closer to Burgess‘ work with Satan’s Satyrs, while “Greasy Bangs” lives up to its name for all of its 90 seconds, a heavy garage instrumental of the ’60s tradition. What’s amazing about it is the whole style is based around familiarity and yet the indentity built up throughout is so individual. I haven’t seen a lot of hype about it, but here’s hoping Burgess continues this pursuit.
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New Mexican Doom Cult, Ziggurat
There have been some personnel shifts in Swedish stoner-doomnodders New Mexican Doom Cult, and their second full-length, Ziggurat, operates mostly in the same volume-worshipping vein of riffing as 2023’s Necropolis (review here), but with a deeper perspective in “Metatron” and the pointedly doomed “Return to Babylon,” among others. The band now is Nils Ahnland on guitar and vocals (also bass), drummer Jonathan Ekvall and Jonas Strömberg on keys/production, and though they’ve given up some tonal impact as a result of dropping to a single guitar (layering notwithstanding; looking at you, “Criosphinx”), the tradeoff is they’re more flexible in sound while remaining plenty heavy from “The Church of Starry Wisdom” onward. Sabbathian roll is a specialty of the house, but the satisfaction when “Sungod” finally kicks in at full volume speaks to a different kind of mastery before the doom-hook in “I Stand Alone” rounds out. Curious where they’ll go from here.
New Mexican Doom Cult on Bandcamp
New Mexican Doom Cult on Instagram
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Lammping/Drew Smith/Marker Starling, Risky
Following on from 2025’s Never Never (review here), Toronto mellow-hangs specialists Lammping continue their four-album cycle of collaborations with this second one, bringing them together with Drew Smith (The Bicycles) and Chris Cummings (Marker Starling), as core Lammping duo Mikhail Galkin (vocals, production, guitar, etc.) and Jay Anderson (drums) slide so smoothly into and out of dub instrumentals and low-key heavy vibes, always fluid, here hinting toward jazz, there shimmering into the techno experiment “Prelude to Never” ahead of the finale “Never Done,” which closes like psychedelic singer-songwriter fare from some lost decade that was never actually real. I guess the update is Lammping remain on their on wavelength of sound and on their own echelon of cool. Spending some time there with them could only be to your greater benefit. Two more LPs coming.
We Are Busy Bodies on Bandcamp
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Mos Eisley Spaceport, Live on Crow Hill
Most of the material on Mos Eisley Spaceport‘s apparently-self-released live album, Live on Crow Hill, comes from their 2023 debut, Further, but with newer two songs at the end in the 12-minute “Interstellar Mantis” and “In Your Mind,” the jam-based classic heavy blues boogie rockers give a glimpse at where they’re headed just the same. And that’s not to take away from “Space Shift” — which starts with the Star Wars sample from whence their moniker hails — or the scope in “Ashes to Ashes” made organic by the fluidity of the band’s performance, I’m just noting the progression underway in their sound. Whether brand new or not, they deliver, and the fact that they’ve added organ to the arrangements in the time since the record came out means these interpretations stand on their own regardless. Most of all, the set is a blast and sounds like they’re having as much fun playing as I am listening, which is plenty. It would feel silly to ask more of it than that, whatever it might portend for them moving forward.
Mos Eisley Spaceport on Bandcamp
Mos Eisley Spaceport on Instagram
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Dome Runner, World Panopticon
How lucky you are that after 40-plus years of industrial sounds depicting dystopian apocalyptic scenarios you finally get to live in one. Dome Runner are the machine punishment humanity deserves in an era where a tech CEO can casually say something about flying drones into people’s heads to kill them and/or licensing common knowledge on a subscription model and not be immediately imprisoned or extrajudicially hanged to the benefit of all. World Panopticon is suitably brutal across a 76-minute span, the Tampere, Finland, troupe keeping one foot in ’90s industrial metal as they did on their 2021 debut, Conflict State Design (review here), but filtering this through modern tonality and horrors. There are breaks, quiet parts in longer songs, interludes, etc., but I don’t know that I’d call any of it a real letup in the looming sense of oppression, and well, get used to that, because the boot on your neck that they’re portraying isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Welcome to the age of it-gets-worse-and-nobody-stops-it. At least you still have the music, for now.
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Basaltic Plateau, Dead Dinosaurs Echoes
While clearly written as individual pieces, the six songs comprising the 36-minute run of Italian heavy psych instrumentalists Basaltic Plateau‘s late-’25 debut LP, Dead Dinosaurs Echoes flow exceedingly well into each other, extrapolating the ebbs and flows within a given track into how it interacts with those around it. In this way, the three-piece build a landscape of sound — some kind of sound… scape! — across the span, warm-toned and so easy enough to liken to a desert rock influence, but heavier in its payoff stretches and up for trippier weirdness in “Summer Dream” and the more technical severity of the closing title-cut, also the longest at nearly nine minutes, and less predictable in its entirety than one might expect going in. As a debut, their self-awareness bodes well, and the psych of “Cuttlefish Galaxy” and progressivism of “Sleep Paralysis” might be careening toward each other like the Milky Way and Andromeda, but if there’s to be a conflict between the two, it’s a ways off. In the meantime, their creative reach serves them in immersing the listener.
Electric Valley Records website
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Gjenferd, Black Smoke Rising
Should you find yourself needing a reason to feel hopeful about the future of heavy rock, that Gjenferd might be part of it should more than suffice. The Bergen, Norway, four-piece of guitarist/vocalist Vegard Bachmann Strand, bassist Samuel Robson Gardner, keyboardist/vocalist Jakob Særvoll and drummer/vocalist Sivert Kleiven Larsen present their second album in Black Smoke Rising, and draw a thread back through decades of heavy rock stylization to conjure a sound that is their own and welcoming, unpretentious and progressive in kind. Whether it’s the shuffle of “Bound to Fall” and the hook of “Ride On” or the moodier nod of “Calling Your Name” and the mellow-till-it-ain’t “The Silence,” the band are dynamic, thoughtful in their craft and vital very much in the ‘alive’ sense of the word across the 10 inclusions, further distinguishing themselves among the emergent next generation of heavy rock and rollers. The listenability here can’t and shouldn’t be discounted, which is to say, don’t be surprised when you come back for another round with it.
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Codex Serafini, Mother, Give Your Children Sanity
I feel like it may forever be my fate to feel like I’m trying to catch up to Codex Serafini. Yes, temporally — their second LP, Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, came out last November — but also stylistically, and in this I feel a oneness with the universe, for which the UK outfit are an intentionally odd fit. Spacerocking in their own dimensional phase, the band follow 2023’s The Imprecation of Anima (review here) with a status-quo threatening cohesion that lands heavy with Wayne Adams‘ production but is more about the plunge into the farther far-out, sax and skronk and ritualistic melodies and madness. The title-track brings healing, but not like you’re thinking, whatever you’re thinking, and the subsequent blowout in capper “Marching Like a Toad” (before the drone finish) could hardly be better earned. Bands rarely sound so willing to follow where their whims take them, and the quirk in Mother, Give Your Children Sanity is more appreciable for that.
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Sunbreather, Sunbreather
Airy grunge pervades the self-titled 2025 full-length debut from UK trio Sunbreather, resulting in a tonal richness one can hear in the eponymous “Sunbreather” or the prior “Apricity” as the record gets going, creating a kind of terrestrial psychedelia that vocal effects and an upped fuzz quotient in all-caps centerpiece/side B leadoff “WINE” seems to revel in pushing to one side or another. I like this album a lot; the way it feels like it’s establishing one aspect of the band’s sound or another and then moves on to the next idea without losing itself in indulgence. The organic flow. The closing pair of “Sleep” and “Aubade” emphasize this, with a fuller lumber in “Sleep” that opens atmospherically in “Aubade” while staying dreamy in tempo at least for most of its time. I say all the time that the challenge for UK bands is distinguishing themselves from the constant glut of their home country’s underground. That might be true here as well, on its face, but in actually hearing the songs, Sunbreather come out ahead in terms of identity. I’m pretty sure this was self-released, but I can’t imagine they wouldn’t be able to find a label if they wanted to for it.
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Konung, Dope Druid
True, the Moscovian plodders don’t have ‘bong’ or ‘weed,’ etc., in their name, but they’re pretty close to bong metal regardless on this initial three-songer, Dope Druid, lumbering through dank megasludge on the opening title-track before rolling noisier into “Wolf Shepherd” and chug-and-feedbacking to a point of near-abrasion (of the willful sort, mind you) on “Tsar of Blood,” making for a solid 19 minutes of damage to eardrums and braincells alike. So much the better a tone on which to break onesself. Imagine drowning in bong water. They aren’t shooting for anything overly complicated, but there is sort of a scope to the onslaught, and the rawness overarching becomes a benefit to the impact of the material — its heft is engrossing and the way the harshness comes through the recording lends aggression to the groove — but I’m not sure that’s aspiration so much as fortunate circumstance. It’s moot, ultimately, because any way you go, Konung have come to crush you into flattened little bits, and the best advice I can give is go with it and deal with the cleanup after.
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