Band:	Sumac
Album:	The Film [Collaboration]
Style:	Post-metal, Sludge metal
Release date:	April 25, 2025
A review by:	RaduP

01. Scene 1
02. Scene 2: The Run
03. Hard Truth
04. Scene 3
05. Scene 4
06. Camera
07. The Truth Is Out There
08. Scene 5: Breathing Fire

I never really expected I'd get to review a Moor Mother album on the main page.

I also never really thought I'd get around to covering Sumac again either, especially after I covered their most abstract non-collaborative album yet in The Healer. And even though I've gotten some enjoyment out of it, I felt like I covered all there is to cover about how Sumac do music, coming off the back of a two part article covering the Aaron Turner-verse up to that point (Sumac appearing only in the latter, which got no user interaction) and they'd have to do something radically different to incentivize me to revisit them as a writer. Well, one of Roadburn's announcements for this year's editions included a Sumac & Moor Mother set, soon to also take the shape of this album.

Getting back to Moor Mother, this is an artist whose many projects I've covered in our non-metal series, from countless of her solo records, to albums she featured on, to collaborations with Billy Woods, to albums as part of Irreversible Entaglements, 700 Bliss, Moor Jewelry, and Zonal. Even though some of these were somewhat heavy, it was all still at an arm's length from metal. For her to finally cross into collaborating with a metal band doesn't feel too surprising, but it's an approach that is so alien to how metal usually operates that it makes it hard for me, who is keen on both traditional and experimental music, to tackle.

For those for whom this is their first contact with Moor Mother, what you'll find here is less properly music, in the sense that while The Film is musical, it doesn't feel like entertainment, nor as experimental music made to extend the borders of music. Moor Mother is a poet whose verses deal with radical politics. And while the music, metal or not, does provide a backdrop for the atmosphere and moods that those verses are supposed to evoke, the verses come to the forefront. From whichever angle you try to tackle this album, whether from a message angle, in which it is radically political, or from a musical angle, in which it is incredibly experimental and abstract, it's bound to be inaccessible and rub a lot of people the wrong way. Simply put, I don't think most people will get something positive out of this album, unless they know what they're getting into, or they like being challenged by the music they listen to.

And that's why Sumac feels like the perfect band to act as Moor Mother's first foray into music. The spoken word approach of Moor Mother, which only occasionally gets close to rapping and much less so on this album, is one whose cadence doesn't necessarily require a structured "beat" underneath it, which is why it worked with jazz, dub, hip-hop in all the projects I already mentioned, and mostly in the more abstract version of each of these genres. So of course it's gonna be the most abstract of the metal bands which can fit as that shift. The instrumental backdrop is incredibly atonal, noisy, switching between chaotic free improvisation sequences to more ambient focused ones to more structured ones that take the band's sludge roots (including some harsh vocals) into something that is very rarely something that can be enjoyed in a traditionally musical way. But the result is scathing and compelling nonetheless.

I hope this isn't Moor Mother's last tangle with metal, though I have a hard time imagining who else other than Sumac could be up for the task (alright, I might have some candidates). Likewise, I'm glad Sumac managed to do something radical with the formless approach they went down on, and I hope they'll find another way to surprise me with it.