Sunn O)))

HOODED summoners of an eternal, all-consuming and strangely ecstatic heavy rock drone, Sunn O))) sometimes feel less like a band and more like a forbidding but ultimately benevolent religious cult. Yet when Greg Anderson reconnected with his erstwhile Thorr’s Hammer and Burning Witch bandmate Stephen O’Malley in LA in 1998, there was never any grand plan. “It started off as an excuse for Stephen and I to play some music together again,” he reveals. “We basically just amplified our common interests: we were influenced for sure by Earth and Melvins and of course Black Sabbath, but we were also really into jazz and experimental music. We had no rulebook, it was like, ‘Let’s just go for it.’”

Looking back, though, O’Malley acknowledges there was something else going on beyond just two friends riffing together. “I see now that it was a big, decades-long conceptual art project, searching for a different language to describe abstraction – even on the first demo, that was there.” This questing outlook has allowed the duo to surge far beyond the confines of the underground metal scene, pulling jazz greats and reclusive pop legends into their vast orbit. “Who knows what’s going to happen next?” O’Malley smiles. “Greg says Sunn’s like a nuclear cockroach, it’s never going to die.”

THE GRIMMROBE DEMOS

DOUBLE H NOISE INDUSTRIES/HYDRA HEAD, 2000

Three glacial rumbles establish the template for everything to come

We were given a couple of hundred bucks to record a Metallica cover for a compilation. We worked up our interpretation of “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, just so we could go into the studio and