On 20 March 2020 Thrill Jockey, the Chicago independent label, released Tub of Lard, the first album by Eye Flys, a Philadelphia quartet that shares its name with the song opening Gluey Porch Treatments, the first Melvins album, from 1987. It had ten songs on it. The longest lasted three minutes and thirty-six seconds.
Sludge is past forty now, give or take one side of a Black Flag record, and the road it runs on was laid by bands that have been written up so often the ink has worn through, ours included: the old names sit in the band list, and the Melvins and their New Orleans descendants are the hardcore under the surface, in the road builder's sense of the word and in the other one. What goes on top of that road now looks like roadworks. A crew rakes fresh asphalt over the old carriageway, black and smoking and smelling of tar, the roller goes over it twice, and for the hour after the lorries leave the new surface is still soft enough to take the print of a boot, heel, tread and all, and whatever walks across it in that hour stays in the road for twenty years.
The rule for this page is short. A first full-length released from 2020 onwards, a label and a date to prove it, two songs to point at. That rules out nearly every sludge band you have already heard of, which is the point. One band breaks the rule, and breaks it on purpose, because a good stretch of the fresh surface carries the shape of its boot.
Whatever walks across it in that hour stays in the road for twenty years.
Vile Creature, the print already in the road
Formed in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2014 by KW on guitar and vocals and Vic on drums and vocals, partners who both identify as queer, and recording its first album in February 2015 in the basement of an abandoned public school in Virgil, Ontario, the two-piece called Vile Creature put out A Steady Descent into the Soil on 13 March 2015, three songs in thirty-eight minutes, and flattened the idea that a sludge band needed a van, a bassist and a second guitarist to bring a ceiling down. It is not a new band. It is the boot.
Cast of Static and Smoke came out on 7 March 2018 through Halo of Flies in America and Dry Cough in Britain, recorded live with one guitar and one drum kit at Signaturetone in Minneapolis with Adam Tucker, four long songs built on a short story the band wrote, the thirteen and a half minutes of "Forest, Subsists as a Tomb" among them. Then Prosthetic, the Los Angeles metal label, released Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm! on 19 June 2020, recorded that February at Boxcar Sound Recordings in Hamilton, and "Harbinger of Nothing" opens it at eleven minutes, dragged forward like a piano being moved up a fire escape by two people who refuse to call for help, and "You Who Has Never Slept", third in the running order, takes the weight down a floor. The record was nominated for Heavy Metal Album of the Year at the 2021 Junos, Canada's national music awards.
The most metal thing that you can do is care about other people.
KW of Vile Creature, interviewed by Luke Morton, Kerrang!, 20 July 2020
Here is why the boot is in the fresh road. In September 2021 the pair covered "Paperdoll" by Kittie for a compilation of nu metal covers put together by The Flenser, the San Francisco label, and on 21 April 2022 the same label released A Hymn of Loss and Hope, one piece of forty minutes made with the Nottingham duo Bismuth, commissioned by Roadburn, the festival in Tilburg, for its 2020 edition and finally played there in 2022. The Flenser had signed Chat Pile in September 2020. A duo that put care, queerness and forty minute dirges on the same records showed the bands pouring their first coat that sludge did not have to be written from the bottom of a bottle.
In July 2024 Vile Creature announced it was stopping live performances indefinitely. KW had spent the previous year with a serious eye condition, Exclaim! reported on 24 July 2024.
The first coat, 2020 to 2022
Eye Flys went down first. The Philadelphia four-piece, with members who also play in Full of Hell and Backslider, dropped the ten songs of Tub of Lard on the listener one after another like the contents of a skip emptied from a third floor window, "Tubba Lard" first and "Guillotine" straight behind it, all steel-barbed riffs and off-kilter rhythms in Thrill Jockey's own description. A self-titled second album followed on the same label on 26 January 2024, made by then as a trio, opening with "Trepanation Summer". I have owned louder records than Tub of Lard. Not many shorter ones.
Formed in 2015 and in no hurry to make an album, the Bristol four-piece Sugar Horse recorded its first album at The Nave, a former Lutheran church in Leeds, and in small rooms around Bristol, released The Live Long After through Small Pond Recordings on 27 August 2021 and ran strings played by Mari and Craig Campbell through the eight minutes and forty-nine seconds of "Dadcore World Cup", having already used eight minutes of "Phil Spector in Hell" to knock through the wall between sludge and shoegaze with a sledgehammer. A single-song EP, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, seventeen minutes recorded in Easton, Bristol, came out on 3 November 2023. Pelagic, the Berlin label, released the second album, The Grand Scheme of Things, on 4 October 2024, a record the band called a sideways step, shorter and more direct, and Not a Sound in Heaven followed on 9 April 2026.
Formed in Oklahoma City in February 2019 by four members who go by Raygun Busch, Luther Manhole, Stin and Cap'n Ron, and signed to The Flenser in September 2020 on the strength of two EPs, the quartet called Chat Pile released God's Country on 29 July 2022, produced by the band itself and mastered by Jared Stimpfl, and "Slaughterhouse" and "Why" come at the listener like a bin lorry reversing through a bus shelter with the radio on. The band calls itself noise rock. Everyone else files it under sludge. Pitchfork gave the album 8.4 and its Best New Music tag, and Cool World followed on 11 October 2024, mixed by Ben Greenberg, with "I Am Dog Now" as the first single. Chat Pile played Roadburn in 2023 and was among the first three names Roadburn announced for 2025.
The UK duo Tuskar released its first full-length, Matriarch, through Church Road Records on 25 February 2022, after three earlier releases going back to Arianrhod in 2017, opening on the eleven minute title track and sinking into the seven and a half of "Shame". On 6 May 2023 the pair played the Saturday of Desertfest London, the stoner and doom weekender held across the venues of Camden.
| Band | From | First album | Label | Released |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eye Flys | Philadelphia | Tub of Lard | Thrill Jockey | 20 March 2020 |
| Sugar Horse | Bristol | The Live Long After | Small Pond | 27 August 2021 |
| Tuskar | UK | Matriarch | Church Road | 25 February 2022 |
| Chat Pile | Oklahoma City | God's Country | The Flenser | 29 July 2022 |
| Ten Ton Slug | Galway | Colossal Oppressor | Self-released | 1 May 2024 |
| Borer | Christchurch | Bag Seeker | Landmine | 10 May 2024 |
Poured in 2024
Galway got there with a slug. After two EPs, Brutal Gluttonous Beast in 2016 and Blood and Slime in 2017, the band called Ten Ton Slug recorded its first full-length at Ciaran Culhane's studio in Limerick with Kelvin Doran on drums, released Colossal Oppressor itself on 1 May 2024, eight tracks in just over forty-one minutes that close on the nine and a half minutes of "Mogore the Unkind", and brought in Karl Willetts of Bolt Thrower to sing on "Brutus", where his voice rolls over the riff like a tank tread over an allotment. Michael Richards mixed and mastered the record at Trackmix in Dublin.
Together in Christchurch since 2021, the New Zealand five-piece Borer recorded the two-track EP Priest Thrower straight after a month of lockdown and released it on 29 October 2021, then, with Tim Hunt in for Adrian Stephenson on second guitar beside Tom Brand on vocals, Boden Powell on guitar, Greg Newton-Topp on bass and Josh Reid on drums, put out Bag Seeker on 10 May 2024 through Landmine Records, a small label in the same city: five tracks, three of them past ten minutes, from the title song and "Ket Witch" down to the twenty-one minutes of "Lord of the Hanged", which crosses the record the way a tar boiler crosses a village, slowly, leaking, with everybody indoors. The band describes its own music as doom and sludge played far too loud. Pack sandwiches.
Before it sets
Nothing on this page has hardened yet. Eye Flys have two albums, Chat Pile two of its own and a third made with the guitarist Hayden Pedigo, Sugar Horse three, Tuskar and Ten Ton Slug and Borer one each, and a band with one album is a surface that can still be scuffed, rutted, dug up by the council or walked into shape by whoever crosses it next. Vile Creature crossed early and left a print. Whether any of the others leaves one deep enough to last is not something a first album can settle.
The bands that crossed the road in the 2010s and have already set into it, the ones a newcomer walks on without noticing, are in the Modern Sludge Metal Bands. The surface here is still warm. Mind where you put your feet.
