Album Review: May You Be Held by Sumac

Few bands clad a soft heart in tensile steel quite like Sumac. All of the abstruse metal trio's four albums over the last five years have been ever more imposing, like self-perpetuating obstacle courses in hell. Ricocheting between formidable doom and barbed improvisation, Sumac sound preternaturally belligerent. But the group's core is the spiritual yearning of Aaron Turner, who since his later days in Isis has often attempted to repurpose metal's malevolent mechanics for personal transcendence.

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Like previous albums by post-metal trio SUMAC, May You Be Held is a set of hulking long-form pieces which balance carefully considered sections with free-form improvisation. The album consists of recordings made during several sessions at multiple studios, including some which produced 2018's Love in Shadow, with some ambitious compositions evolving over the course of several years, while others are born from spontaneous creation. As with any of the band's releases, this one requires extreme patience, as it can go from lengthy passages of near-stillness to unrelenting torrents of sound.

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May You Be Held by SUMAC Metal people tend to use the word "ritual" the way other folks say stuff like "concert" or "record." The verbal gesture is meant to suggest the summoning of dark forces and profound precarity, but usually it ends up sounding sort of silly. There's nothing silly about SUMAC's new LP, May You Be Held, which is by turns excoriating, thrilling and emotionally exhausting. There are also no dimly glowing tapers, huffing-puffing smoke machines or corpse paint.

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