When a band drops the last three words of its own name, you wonder what else they’re leaving behind. Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard, the Welsh quartet responsible for a run of dense, slow-burning psych-doom records, slimmed down to the acronym MWWB for their fourth album, and the title change turned out to be the least surprising thing about it. The Harvest, released through New Heavy Sounds in March 2022 and produced by Chris Fielding at Foel Studio, is not just a shift in branding. It’s a pivot toward something more deliberate, more cinematic, and considerably stranger than anything that came before.
The album opens with “Oblok Magellana,” a two-minute atmospheric threshold, electronics and low drones that feel less like an intro and more like a pressurisation chamber before the airlock opens. It doesn’t resolve so much as it exhales into the title track, “The Harvest,” which runs to nine and a half minutes and earns every one of them. The riff at its core is colossal but unhurried, the kind that settles into the room and waits for your eyes to adjust. Synths, moog, mellotron, sit high in the mix alongside the guitars rather than underneath them, and that choice defines what this record is: a heavy album that treats its electronics as structure, not decoration.
“Interstellar Wrecking” breaks the spell briefly, arriving at three and a half minutes with a sense of forward motion that the surrounding pieces deliberately resist. Then “Logic Bomb” opens back up, nearly eight minutes of slow accumulation that draws closer to the deep-space film scores the band have always cited as reference points, John Carpenter in zero gravity, essentially. “Betrayal” is the album’s most minimal moment, spare and slightly eerie, another interlude that signals an intent to keep the listener off-balance. It works.
The album’s second half carries the greater weight. “Altamira” is seven minutes of the most melodically developed writing here, the vocals pushing higher against a guitar tone that feels almost geological. “Let’s Send These Bastards Whence They Came”, the most combative title on a record full of them, is four minutes of something closer to focus: tighter, more direct, with a propulsive rhythm section that keeps it from drifting. Then “Strontium,” at nine and a half minutes, is the record’s most divisive moment. The theremin-adjacent synth that runs through its second half is either the thing that pulls it all together or the thing that slightly unravels it, depending on your tolerance for texture over riff. It’s a genuine argument, and an interesting one to have with an album this confident.
“Moon Rise” closes everything down gently, a four-and-a-half-minute landing sequence that doesn’t try to summarise what came before. It simply ends the journey and leaves you somewhere different from where you started.
Chris Fielding’s production is exactly right for the material, close and detailed rather than cavernous, with a mix that lets the electronics and guitars compete for space on equal terms. The record is designed to be listened to in one sitting, and that’s not a warning so much as an instruction. Heard as fragments, it loses its logic. Heard whole, it makes total sense.
Standout tracks: The Harvest, Logic Bomb, Altamira
MWWB didn’t shrink into their new name. The Harvest is a bigger and more ambitious record than the band has made before, which is the best thing a rebrand can be.
