Sumac — the heady assemblage of forward-thinking heavy-music veterans Aaron Turner (ISIS, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer), Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists, Erosion) and Brian Cook (Russian Circles) — are set to release their highly anticipated fourth album Love in Shadow September 21st on Thrill Jockey records. Today, the band has unleashed the lead single off the LP, the twisted, multilayered epic "Attis' Blade," which can be streamed via Spotify below.
"Before SUMAC was even a fully formed band, there was a goal I had in mind for how to approach writing songs: marrying fully realized structures to freely improvised movements — and trying to find fluid passages between these worlds," Turner offers of the song. "'Attis' Blade' is a breakthrough for us in that it comes closer to meeting that goal than anything else we'd written previously. It's a song I'm happy with in its own right, and more importantly as a key to the next step in our evolutional process. In this song I hear the three of us learning to trust one another more fully, and collectively embracing a more expansive dimension of our existence. Lyrically, the song has to do with succumbing to base desires, the subsequent self-abuse/admonishment to atone for these perceived transgressions of moral code, and also the personal histories that can lead to this kind of behavioral dysfunction."
Love in Shadow is available for pre-order here. For more on Turner and the band's influences, read our recent in-depth interview with him about eight albums that have scared and inspired him.
