Band:	Drune
Album:	Drown
Style:	Doom metal, Sludge metal, Stoner metal
Release date:	July 2023

01. In The Earth
02. In The Sea

The new EP from Drune is called Drown; with a band-album title combo that features two semi-rhymes of ‘drone’, you might expect this to be a drone release. Anyone making that assumption is vaguely along the right lines, but not as much as they might be anticipating.

Drune come from Colorado, which seems like the most exciting place in the US for metal right now, based on the number of quality groups emerging from there. The three-piece have been working on this 2-song EP since before the release of their self-titled debut full-length album in late 2021, but circumstances have held it from completion until now. Reflecting the title, the record tells a story of a great wave washing over earth, dragging the listener down to and below the ocean floor; the songs are an expression of grief over losses, personal and societal, sustained over the past few years, but with a glimmer of light with the prospect of starting anew and wiping the slate clean. Fittingly, this is a murky, heavy album, but one with the prospect of light and melody at the end.

To return to the beginning of the review, Drune are not a drone band; their earliest available records are basically stoner doom, and as time has gone on, that stoner doom has become sludgier. However, even on ”High Desert”, their first recorded song that I can find (their Instagram mentions a 2017 demo that seems to have disappeared from Bandcamp), has some degree of sustain and repetition in a way that’s not a million miles away from drone metal, and portions of Drown, particularly “In The Sea”, do have a ponderous, trudging pace and tonal sustain that bears some similarities to funeral doom and drone doom (not to mention the 2-long-song album format is one that’s been used very effectively by the drone-doomsters in Bong).

Still, this is first and foremost a stoner/sludge doom release, and the first track “In The Earth” is perhaps more sludge than stoner. The tone here, from the gnarly guitars to the grim shrieks, is murky and malevolent; the pace is pretty reliably slow/mid-tempo, but there are occasional double bass rolls beneath to add a slight death/doom menace. The song seems primed to appeal to fans of the likes of Bongripper, Conan and Green Druid, with the ponderous riffs slathered in a menacing fuzz, and the track only evolving to any notable degree in the closing couple of minutes, when it turns into even more of a quagmire of feedback and distortion.

Where Drown truly shines, in my opinion, is with “In The Sea”; after the relentless misery of the opening song, this is where Drune look beyond the anger and darkness, and suggest that hope may not all be lost. The melodic yet melancholic chords that comprise the slow, sustained passages that dominate this song take my mind straight to Yob, and particularly songs such as “Marrow” and “Our Raw Heart”. Additionally, the harsh rasps found on the opening track are replaced, at least for some of the song, by distant, hazy clean vocals. There is a heavy passage about a third of the way through the song, but it doesn’t stick around for long before Drune return to the more mellow sounds, and from there, it is a very gradual winding down until the minimalist conclusion of the song.

The two songs work very nicely together as part of a concept, but “In The Sea” is the song that makes me enthusiastic to see where Drune go next. They have a clear knack for making slow, ponderous music compelling and evocative, which is a great skill to have.