Aaron Turner built his reputation in Isis, a band that understood post-metal as cinema, that treated volume and silence as the functional equivalents of cut and dissolve. Sumac, his project with bassist Brian Cook (Russian Circles) and drummer Nick Yacyshyn, takes that foundation and pushes it toward something more difficult, less resolved: post-metal that doesn’t offer the catharsis of its predecessors. The Film arrives with track titles that suggest a screenplay, Scene 1, Scene 2: The Run, Hard Truth, Scene 3, Scene 4, Camera, and then proceeds to tell a story without resolution, which is probably the most honest kind.
“Scene 1” opens with a patience that establishes the album’s rhythmic logic, complex, interlocking, the three musicians playing against each other rather than in unison. “Scene 2: The Run” is the album’s most driven track, the closest Sumac come to the conventional post-metal they’ve spent their career complicating: there’s a propulsion here, a forward momentum, that makes the stillness before and after it more pronounced by contrast. “Hard Truth” is the record’s center and its most demanding track, long, destabilizing, the kind of music that requires you to surrender any expectation of where it’s going in order to hear where it actually is.
“Camera” closes the album by pulling back to the device that structures the whole thing: observation itself, the act of watching, and what it costs.
Turner, Cook, and Yacyshyn have played together long enough to have developed a chemistry that’s impossible to manufacture, the way each member leaves space for the others, the way rhythmic motifs get passed between instruments without announcement. The production captures this interplay at full resolution: no element dominates, no instrument disappears. Guitar tones are exploratory rather than simply heavy, there’s as much noise and texture as riff, which pushes the album toward experimental territory without losing its physical weight.
Standout tracks: Scene 2: The Run, Hard Truth, Camera
The Film is challenging in the way that genuine artistic ambition always is, it doesn’t meet you where you are. But for listeners willing to go where Sumac go, there’s more here than almost anything else in the genre this year.
