Hi everyone, Bluethoyn Jeanstano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd and it's time for a review of this new Sumac and Moor Mother album, The Film.

Here we have a new collaboration between two music acts who are most definitely keeping the underground interesting these days, Sumac and Moor Mother. Sumac is a post metal and experimental metal outfit, a super group really, with connections to Old Man Gloom, Russian Circles, Isis, and Baptists. I've covered their music in the past on this channel, including a really cool crossover they did a while ago with avant garde guitarist Keiji Haino, and last year Metal and Coffee – shout Oot to her – did a great review for their previous album The Healer on the channel.

And yeah, I'm surprised and pleased to see them on this record collaborating with poet/songwriter extraordinaire Moor Mother, a prolific Maryland artist who can sometimes be difficult to categorize because while her style and strengths and talents are pretty obvious regardless of what project you're listening to from her, she still somehow makes it work in so many different contexts. Whether it is her record from last year, The Great Bailout, which was one of my favorites of 2024, but she also has projects deeper into her catalog that go in more of a sound collage direction, avant garde jazz; an abstract hip hop excursion with none other than billy woods; as well as the stellar no wave and hardcore punk fusions going on on True Opera.

And now with Sumac on The Film, her biting and unnerving poetry is gracing the band's mountainous and noisy and abrasive riffs, which vary pretty greatly across the album.

I will remind you the title of this record is The Film, so of course there are many key tracks in the runtime of this album that are titled "Scene 1", "Scene 2", "Scene 3", etc. And there are some guitar passages on this LP that feel like a combination of heavy, crushing, mesmerizing post metal with a bit of sludgy grit. Other tracks feel more inspired by death metal or the drone metal stylings of bands like Sunn O))). Meanwhile, some of the quieter and more despondent moments on the record come across as something like you would hear on a Slint album, specifically on "Scene 3". And these bases are more or less what I feel like you could expect Sumac to cover given their previous material, and I think a lot of what Moor Mother is saying and doing on this record is to be expected as well.

In fact, I would say a lot of the content on "Scene 1" feels like residuals from her the Great Bailout cycle, which again, I loved, as you have a lot of lines on this track that address slavery as well as systemic racism, extending these themes out into greater feelings of disillusionment and just generally losing all hope in the American dream and purchasing guns at Walmart in some feeble attempt to attain a sense of protection and freedom and individual rights.

So the point I'm trying to make here is that I don't think this record is effectively a case of Moor Mother and Sumac pushing each other into like new or challenging territory that's challenging for each of them respectively. I think The Film instead is more each of them reinforcing what they already do well and just finding that, miraculously, it's just very complementary. Yeah, I mean, outside of some dronier passages to really allow Moor Mother's poetry to breathe, and also some pretty heavy vocal manipulations and pitch shifting on some tracks, this does kind of feel like, yeah, what you would get if they just decided to randomly perform together. And again, it somehow it just works functionally very well.

And the proof of that concept comes through in just how intense and disconcerting the end results are here. And I mean, for as loud and as visceral as it is, I wouldn't call this an "entertaining" album. This is more a record that's gonna turn you inside out and remind you of how grim the current day reality actually is, as each "scene" on this thing pulls us deeper into these feelings of rebellious anger and I would say a touch of hopelessness too.

The lengthy "Scene 2" track features all of these frantic repeated lines about running, escaping, but simultaneously having no home to really return to because it's been bombed, destroyed, there's really no safe place to hide. And this of course is very apt given just all of the scenes and imagery of genocide that has been splashed all over our social media feeds for the past two years now.

"Scene 3", I think, is very much about a struggle to survive in a country, in America, where costs of living is rising every day. Human rights are under attack too. Which leaves Moor Mother writing essentially an ode to the sorts of things that people used to hope for and aspire to and look forward to when things societally were just more functional. It's very much about a struggle to make sense of it all. Meanwhile, Sumac's crushing riffs just bring even more weight to Moor Mother's words.

"Scene 4" is a pretty low key passage that I continue returning to, but I'm not exactly floored by it in comparison with the rest of material on the album. But considering how massive and just daunting some of the passages of this record are, it's nice to have, I guess, a bit of a breather.

The song "Camera" is another highlight for me personally, mostly because it deals a lot in surveillance, lack of privacy, the Panopticon, as it were. And I love that Sumac on this particular track decided to take things in like more of a free improv, noise metal direction.

And really just the last track to address on this record is the massive 16 minute closer, which really ties things up on The Film with a dystopian and apocalyptic bow.

But yeah, massive record, great record, intense listen for sure, and just another surprisingly great and also unlikely Moor Mother collab, which is why I'm feeling a decent to strong 8 on this one.

Anthony Fantano. Sumac. Moor Mother. Forever.