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Loaded with tension and anchored by bold textural and stylistic contrasts, Sam Slater’s third solo full-length finds the British sound artist, composer, and engineer grappling with his creative contradictions head-on.

For years, he’s been pulled in various directions, too often constrained by external expectations. Working in the experimental realm can be freeing, but it comes with its own rules and regulations. Spend too much time buzzing through avant-garde circles and rumination becomes second nature—work often ends up inward-looking rather than outward-facing.

So Slater inventoried his interests and hardened his resolve, challenging himself to work quickly and resist the temptation to overthink. If an idea sounded unrealistic, it simply gave him more momentum to crack his knuckles and solve the problem seamlessly.

Take the opening track “Heatsick”: Slater imagines an extravagant fusion of Deftones-style metal and vintage British brass, welding ear-splitting overdriven drones and blown-out choral vocals to stirring trombone swells from veteran player Hilary Jeffery. On paper, it’s hard to imagine—but Slater’s intentionality conducts these polarizing elements into a surreal blur of sonic extremes, with the guitars’ relative harshness softened by Jeffery’s eerily nostalgic colliery echoes.

Slater has been working towards LUNNG for some time. Not only has he racked up accolades for high-profile scoring work—collaborating with Hildur Guðnadóttir on the Grammy Award-winning Joker and Chernobyl, and with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov on the soundtrack to 2000 Meters to Andriivka—but he has also worked with a wide array of vastly different artists, from Jóhann Jóhannsson and Ryuichi Sakamoto to Jules Reidy and Shapednoise.

His last solo album, I do not wish to be known as a Vandal (Bedroom Community, 2022), showcased this breadth by assembling a team of collaborators including Sam Dunscombe and Yair Elazar Glotman. This time, his focus is sharper. Linking up with acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Maria W. Horn, idiosyncratic sax virtuoso Bendik Giske, versatile percussionist Adam Betts, and the aforementioned Jeffery, Slater ushers these players toward a lattice of calculated confutations.

It would be too easy for him to simply absorb their signature skills—LUNNG was meant to be challenging. On “Praya”, Giske’s familiar overblown horn phrases are almost vaporized, vanishing among Slater’s weightless synths and Horn’s chillingly hoarse vocals. There are traces of Horn’s Funeral Folk project, but Slater shifts the emphasis, letting her voice brush past the other elements like a hallucination.

Slater’s use of extremes isn’t just in the micro; dynamics drive the album’s overall flow. “Praya” sets the stage for the record’s heaviest, most prickly moment: “Passengers”. Here, Horn’s voice cracks, rasps, and gurgles over serrated synths and Betts’ ritualistic drums. Slater turns an industrial symphony into a folk opera—dark, dramatic, and strangely beautiful—etched with Giske’s fluttering phrases.

But the mood soon shifts. Slater careens toward chaos, unleashing double-time rhythms and piercing textures familiar to anyone with a soft spot for classic black metal. These grotesque incongruities are deliberate; Slater surveys years of musical conflict and leans in, using dissent as fuel to build kinetic energy.

The weight of sentimentality bears down on “Black Metal Rewind (Night Drive Astra, 2006)”, melting teenage memories into hypnagogic ambience—shoegaze dreams whirled with angelic choral delusions. On “Death by Nostalgia, 1688”, he ventures further into polarizing territory, distorting poppy AutoTuned voices with cryptic strings and medieval tonalities, unsettling any stable sense of past or present.

By dismantling genre, Slater focuses on pure energy, color, and mood. LUNNG distills years of listening into a bracing brew—boiling each sound down to its essence, then serving it with unflinching intent.

John Twells, 2025