Bandcamp The first thing to understand about Stoned Villains is the production lineage. Danilo Battocchio recorded and mixed the album at Deepest Sea Studio in Turin, the same room where Ponte del Diavolo tracked their De Venom Natura live-to-tape sessions earlier this year. James Plotkin handled the master, which puts Tons in the company of Moloch and the broader Khanate-adjacent lineage that Plotkin has shaped over thirty years of mastering work. Heavy Psych Sounds released the record on April 20th, the date being the joke that the band have organized most of their career around. Recording at Deepest Sea is not a joke. Plotkin is not a joke. The trade between concept and execution is where this album lives.
The signature of the Battocchio room is what gives Tons their weight. The Deepest Sea sound is dry, close-mic’d, mid-heavy, with a particular density in the low-mid territory that pushes guitars and bass into the same physical space. On a band like Ponte del Diavolo with two basses, that density becomes the center of gravity. On Tons, with a more conventional rhythm-section setup (Gingerzilla on vocals, bass, and synth, alongside Stewart J Tanuki on guitar and Duncan Mc Crapper on lead and samples, with Oreste Pennarelli drumming), the same density does different work. The bass and rhythm guitar fuse into a single textured wall, with Mc Crapper’s lead lines cutting across as the only consistently distinct voice in the mix.
Plotkin’s master pushes that wall hard. The loudness target sits at contemporary doom-sludge levels, which means the dynamic contrast within each track gets compressed in service of overall impact. This is a defensible choice for the material. Tons write songs that operate primarily through cumulative pressure rather than dynamic peaks and valleys, and Plotkin’s master serves that priority by ensuring every section hits with the same physical weight as every other section. The trade is what gets sacrificed in the densest passages: the kick drum’s punch, the bass’s articulation as a separate voice, the breathing room that would let the longer tracks (three of them stretch past seven minutes) develop with more architectural variation.
What the production cannot fix is the song-level consequence of the band’s commitment to the bit. “Shirley Temple Ball,” “The Big Bong Theory,” “Darth Vaper,” “Rollercoaster Diet Bombo.” The titles are jokes. Some of them land. None of them undermine the music underneath, which operates in a deadly serious sludge-doom vocabulary that the band have been refining since 2013. The closing track, “Rollercoaster Diet Bombo,” is the album’s most concentrated piece at three minutes, and it makes the case for what Tons do best: dense, riff-forward, hardcore-inflected sludge that does not require the goofy framing to work. The opening “Shirley Temple Ball” runs eight and a half minutes and uses its runtime well, with arrangement shifts that the band’s earlier work would have rushed through.
For listeners who have followed the Heavy Psych Sounds catalog, Stoned Villains fits the label’s evolution toward heavier, less psych-rock-adjacent material. Where the label’s early years leaned on stoner-rock revivalism, the recent releases (Tons included) sit further into the doom-sludge end of the spectrum, with the production polish that European underground doom has been settling into across the last five years. The closest current comparisons are probably bands like Desert Storm, who share the Heavy Psych Sounds roster, and the broader Italian sludge underground that Tons have been operating in since their early splits.
The compositional weakness, where there is one, is that not every track justifies its length. “The Big Bong Theory” runs eight minutes and stays mostly in the same mode, and “Lost in Plantation” at seven minutes has the same issue: the riff is good, the groove is right, but the song does not build. This is a structural concern that the Battocchio-Plotkin axis cannot solve from the production side. It is a writing concern. When the band stay disciplined (the closing track, the intro piece, the second-half stretch of “Hangover the Top”) the songwriting matches the production. When they do not, the production has to carry weight the songs were not built to support.
The mix is dense and mid-focused, with the Deepest Sea signature low-mid weight pushed hard by Plotkin’s master. Rhythm guitars and bass occupy similar frequency territory, fusing into a single textured wall in the heaviest passages. Drums are close-mic’d, with kick providing low-end punch and snare snap-forward, though cymbals occasionally push into harsh transient territory in the densest sections. Vocals sit prominently with good projection, and the spoken-word interludes carry through clearly when they appear. Dynamic range is restricted within the loudness-target framework, with structural shifts in arrangement carrying contrast rather than volume. Lead guitar lines cut cleanly across the rhythm wall, and the ambient sample work occasionally adds texture without overcrowding. Harmonic complexity sits at expected levels for the material.
Standout tracks: “Rollercoaster Diet Bombo” for the closing three minutes that distill what Tons do without filler. “Shirley Temple Ball” for the opener that uses eight and a half minutes well. “Hangover the Top” for the second half where the band’s sludge instincts and hardcore roots meet most cleanly.
Stoned Villains is the record where Tons’ production resources finally meet their concept. The Deepest Sea room and Plotkin’s master are not background details. They are why this album sounds the way it sounds, and they are what makes the record more than a fourth iteration on a joke the band have been telling for over a decade. The songwriting could push further on structure, and a few of the longer tracks would have been sharper at five minutes than seven. But for a doom-sludge band committed to the goofy-titles-serious-music register, this is the sound they were building toward.
