Album Review: Stoned Jesus, Songs to Sun
Posted in Reviews on September 22nd, 2025 by JJ Koczan
There is greater instrumental and emotional intelligence in Stoned Jesus‘ work than I’ve ever seen them given credit for. And they are not a band particularly wanting for plaudits. Part of it’s the name, right? I know. Sometimes a band has a name, and then sometimes maybe that name over time represents a little less what they do than where they came from. Stoned Jesus hit on a landmark over a decade ago with their second album, 2012’s Seven Thunders Roar (review here), and thanks in no small part to millions of views (16 mil and counting) for “I’m the Mountain” from that record, they were able to become spearheads for a new generation of heavy rockers finding new bands in a new way. You’d keep the name too.
That was a while ago now, as noted, but Stoned Jesus have never stopped walking the path they were on, and to the eternal credit of founding guitarist, vocalist, keyboardist and lead songwriter Igor Sydorenko, they’ve never capitulated creative drive to suit audience expectation. They’ve never stopped growing, and while there’s no question their sixth full-length, Songs to Sun, is not the album they planned on making coming off of 2023’s Season of Mist label-debut, Father Light (review here), the circumstances of the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine forced Sydorenko to leave his home country, resettle the band in Germany, and reform the lineup with bassist/backing vocalist Andrew Rodin and drummer/backing vocalist Yurii Ciel both making their first studio across these six songs and 41 minutes.
Father Light was initially to have been complemented by a sequel, Mother Dark. As I understood it, Mother Dark was recorded but shelved amid everything else. It now becomes lore — the lost Stoned Jesus LP — which is kind of fun, but it’s hard to imagine that if it’s actually done and sitting there, it won’t surface at some point in the future. Still, Songs to Sun, which the band will reportedly follow with Songs to Moon sometime in 2026 and Songs to Earth sometime in 2027, begins a different trilogy cycle, also somewhat positioned around notions of light and dark in addition to the various other themes that emerge in the first installment, whether that’s touring in opener “New Dawn” and the penultimate “See You on the Road” or cuts like “Shadowland,” “Low” “Lost in the Rain” and closer “Quicksand,” which foster a more personal, internally-focused point of view while pushing Stoned Jesus to new places musically. And if you might say, “wait, that’s all the songs,” yup, you’ve got the idea.
Because while Songs to Sun echoes Father Light in a kind of titular luminosity heralding contrast to come, the two albums are divergent enough in their intent to give the impression of the band having actually redirected from one project to another. Some of that comes from the unrepentant metallurgy happening in the two shortest inclusions here, which are “Shadowland” and “Low,” both around four minutes long. After “New Dawn” lays out its welcome/wakeup and showcases both the tones to please old and new fans and the first of the vocal showcases Sydorenko will put on throughout — his vocal range has never been more apparent or confident; he sounds like the professional frontman he’s become over time, and shreds on guitar besides — taking its time across in the build of its almost-nine minutes but never losing direction thanks in part to the grounding effect of its memorable chorus, going big at the outset, “Shadowland” represents an immediate departure.
Crashing in on a lumbering swing, the band reveal a thick and nigh-on-funky start-stop verse procession in “Shadowland,” more immediate than the opener but still tempered in pace. The real turn happens with the chorus, which pays off the tension of all that bounce with a melodic, full-sounding push that reminds most of all of something Katatonia might proffer. It’s a different take than I’ve ever heard from Stoned Jesus, but as with everything else on Songs to Sun, there’s no new ground they touch that is beyond their reach. The vocal layering and flourish of keys are prescient, and if you wanted to stretch a bit, you could say the production gave hints of the metal to come in the payoff of “New Dawn,” but really, the build in “Shadowland” is its own thing, and serves well as an example of Stoned Jesus‘ willfully progressive songcraft. They never drop the melody, and they give a noisy impression without being out of control, Sydorenko positioned at the center of the storm. His vocals become an element tying the songs together.
Not the only one, however. Songs to Sun is sequenced such that, on the vinyl, there are three songs per side. Digitally or on CD, it works out that the tracklisting trades off between four longer and shorter pieces before flipping that so that “See You on the Road” (5:45) leads into the definitely-the-closer “Quicksand,” also the longest of the bunch at just under 10 minutes. The malleability isn’t a coincidence; it comes from the songs themselves trying and executing new ideas, so that even as “Lost in the Rain” sets up a melancholy mirror with “Quicksand” in closing side A — the acoustic guitar and mellotron of the earlier cut becomes part of a long intro and a mellower, mostly-instrumental progressive-style flow, classy in how it brings in tonal weight and moves through its plotted solo into the fade, feeling like a meander but again, never without direction — it isn’t quite as hypnotic as the repetitive structure of the finale, but communes in a somewhat likeminded atmosphere. This dynamic, of the songs speaking to and about each other, bolstering each other to make the whole offering stronger and more complete, finds a certain kind of pinnacle in “Low.”
Namely the metal kind. If “Shadowland” demonstrated that the Sydorenko/Rodin/Ciel incarnation of Stoned Jesus — which, just to emphasize, is a different band than that which put out Father Light only two years ago — had an underlying current of intensity, “Low” is where that comes forward. The side B opener sets out with a cymbal count-in and a speedy galloping omegakyuss riff that’s likewise brash and catchy, but it’s after two minutes in, when they shift from the somewhat twisting rhythm to a straight-ahead all-out blastbeaten black metal pummel — topped with a throaty high register scream, no less — that Stoned Jesus show just how far into extremity they’re willing to push to get a point across. That turn momentarily upends the song, but they bring it back to finish, the drums every bit showing the resonance of their Karl Daniel Lidén mix/master (recording was by Ignancy Gruzecki in Poland; Sydorenko is listed as producer) on the way to the sudden-sweep of an ending. It sounds like they’ll have fun playing it live.
Which perhaps is part of why “Low” rests so easily next to “See You on the Road” despite the latter’s more definitively heavy rock chug. With an epic-style hum-topped crescendo stretch in its second half, “See You on the Road” carries is-hot-shit-and-knows-it swagger and, while retaining the threat that at any minute they might again break out into blastbeats, they set up a grungier melody in the vocals ahead of the chorus setting up both its own hook and that of the breakdown riff that follows. Introduced by double-kick drumming, that stretch in “See You on the Road” deserves to be played on every European festival stage for the next year, and it would seem to have been written with that intention in mind as well. With the theatricality of its post-midpoint takeoff, it’s in some ways the culmination of Songs to Sun as a whole, but there’s more than epilogue to “Quicksand” as the trio pull off one last turn and redirect.
As noted, “Quicksand” follows on in part from “Lost in the Rain,” but the arrangement is notably stripped down in comparison. It is acoustic strum and foreboding drums and bass at the start. There’s piano, and the light and dark there (everywhere) becomes backdrop for spoken word from Sydorenko, repeating a litany of “tired of” declarations. Tired of getting screwed over, tired of bombs, you get the idea. The next verse is sung, soulfully, over Ciel‘s tense drumming before the guitar comes back. A build is undertaken and seen to fruition, then dropped. Sydorenko‘s voice, once more centrally positioned in the material, repeats the line, “…To become what you hate the most,” then steps back and the last build announces itself. You know when you’re there. The acoustic guitar stays but they’re metal by the end anyhow. The vocals chant, part of the fray now manic in crash and guitar. It ends when everything leaves and the line turns around to, “to become what I hate the most,” to cap the track and album. Gorgeous.
Ten years and several months ago, a different incarnation of Stoned Jesus announced with 2015’s third album, The Harvest (review here), that not only could they liberate you with a riff, but that they were a more complex and more progressive outfit than anyone expected them to be. They have in the time since refused to dumb-down their creative ambitions and intentions, and Songs to Sun is the latest reward for that refusal. Longtime fans will find it mature in the songwriting but refreshed with the captured performances of a new lineup, and triumphant in the realization of its goals. Stoned Jesus stand among the best European heavy rock bands of their generation, and one only hopes they continue following the path of which this album now forms an integral part.
More to come with Songs to Moon? I guess we’ll find out. But if that record is going to reveal this one as only half the story — and there’s always a risk with staggered LP releases recorded around the same time; I can think of examples of bands ending up with a weaker-seeming second part owing to repeated ideas from the first; I wouldn’t put it past Stoned Jesus to have some trick up their collective sleeve to get around this — there’s nothing here that feels incomplete in the listening as the band draw threads across seemingly disparate elements and emerge from the process with like measures of cohesion, individuality and aural force. Approach with an open mind and discover one of the best albums you’ll hear in 2025.
