The Surpeti is a drone instrument from the Indian subcontinent, traditionally used as a harmonic foundation for mantra singing. It sustains a tone rather than playing melodies. It provides a center to hold onto. Pothamus from Mechelen, Belgium have built their second album around one, and the choice is more than aesthetic — it tells you exactly how this band thinks about heaviness: not as impact alone, but as something that needs a foundation to mean anything.
Abur is a 47-minute pilgrimage. That’s the word Pothamus themselves use, and it earns the description by the end. The six tracks — “Zhikarta”, “Ravus”, “De-varium”, “Savartuum Avur”, “Ykavus”, and the title track — don’t function as standalone pieces so much as stages of something larger. The album opens with weight and deliberateness, builds through increasingly complex layers of sludge riff and drone, and arrives at “Abur” as something close to resolution, though what exactly has been resolved is left to the listener. That ambiguity is intentional: Pothamus are working with animism and eastern philosophy here, ideas about interconnectedness and the dissolution of the boundary between self and environment, and the music maps that conceptual territory without ever making it feel like homework.
The production — by Chiaran Verheyden of Psychonaut, recorded at MotorMusic Studio in Mechelen — deserves specific credit. Verheyden understood that this band’s combination of sludge guitar, tribal percussion, drone, and layered vocals needed space to coexist without any one element eating the others. The result is a mix where the Surpeti’s sustained tones genuinely hold the center while the heavier elements move around it, rather than the drone becoming just another texture in an undifferentiated wall of sound. Drummer Mattias Van Hulle and guitarist Sam Coussens also share vocal duties here, which adds a depth to the upper register that most sludge bands leave empty.
This is one of the more sonically unusual heavy records you’ll encounter in 2025 — the drone elements give the mix a constant harmonic anchor that sludge normally doesn’t have, which means the heavy parts land harder by contrast. The bass is prominent throughout, not just as low-end weight but as a melodic presence; the guitar moves between abrasive saturation and open, resonant passages that let the drone instrument breathe. Percussion is tribal in feel rather than purely rhythmic — it’s marking time, but it’s also marking ceremony.
Standout tracks: Zhikarta, Savartuum Avur, Abur
Abur is the rare heavy record that takes its concept seriously without disappearing up its own philosophy. Pothamus have made something genuinely immersive and genuinely heavy at the same time, which is harder than it sounds. One of 2025’s best.