There is a line buried deep in the closing track of The Live Long After that you will recognise immediately, because it is the same line that opens the record. “Bring this plague, a brave new harmony”, Sugar Horse fold their debut back on itself, the end eating the beginning, the whole thing a loop with no exit. It’s a small gesture, but it tells you exactly what kind of band you’re dealing with: one that thinks structurally, that plans the rug pull from the first note.
The Bristol quartet built their reputation on the live circuit before this record existed, and something of that relentlessness transfers to tape. The Live Long After, recorded at The Nave in Leeds and various unnamed rooms around Bristol, co-produced with Andy Hawkins, has the quality of a band performing at the edge of their range, not quite at the point of failure but close enough that the tension never fully releases. It is a deliberately uncomfortable listen, and it earns that discomfort.
“I Am Not Now, nor Have I Ever Been…” is barely two minutes of scene-setting before “Shouting Judas at Bob Dylan” arrives and makes its intentions clear. The title is funny in the way Sugar Horse’s titles are consistently funny, sardonic, a little arch, and the song itself does not share the joke. It is blunt and heavy, the guitars thickening into something that recalls classic post-hardcore without ever quite becoming it, and the “Bring out your dead” refrain lands with real ugliness. They are not interested in comfort.
What makes the record worth sitting with is how much it moves. “Fat Dracula” pivots into something bleaker and more meditative, circling a dead-weight riff, a dead tonne / a black sun / the work done / was worth none, with the kind of unhurried patience that suggests the band know exactly when to stop pushing. “Phil Spector In Hell” is the album’s clearest melody, a five-minute track that floats before it sinks, and the juxtaposition with the grimness around it gives it a strange warmth.
The title track is the record’s centrepiece at eight minutes, and the most explicit statement of the album’s themes, impermanence, dread, the weight of time. It does not resolve so much as exhaust itself into stillness. “Terrible Things Are Happening As We Speak” snaps things back into focus, shorter and more direct, before “The Great British Death Cult” opens into the album’s grandest stretch: a six-minute track that builds through waves of guitar into something almost devotional, the word “transcendental” appearing in the lyrics without a trace of irony.
“Dadcore World Cup” is where the record commits fully to scale. Eight and a half minutes of instrumental drift and eventual weight, it is the album’s strangest and most patient moment, the kind of track that demands the listener meet it rather than the other way around. ”…A Las Vegas Showgirl” closes things in a fury, cycling through noise and collapse before arriving back at that opening lyric, the circle complete.
The production is not clean. It was never going to be, this is a band that recorded in various small rooms and wanted you to hear the walls. But the roughness is purposeful; the guitars have enough low-end to press down, the vocals sit in the mix like something overheard rather than delivered, and the whole record has a coherence that rough recordings often lack. Hawkins and the band kept the chaos disciplined without defanging it.
The Live Long After is not an easy record. It is, at times, genuinely exhausting. But it is also the kind of debut that sounds like a band who knew what they wanted and had the discipline to make it happen, however uncomfortable the result.
Standout tracks: Shouting Judas at Bob Dylan, The Live Long After, The Great British Death Cult
