Sugar Horse have always been known for melding sludge metal with the gothic new wave influences of the eighties. With Gaza at the centre, Not a Sound in Heaven interrogates the systems that make such horrors not just possible but inevitable in a searing critique of capitalism as we’re currently living through it, and it’s one of the most important records of 2026.

There’s a reason Sugar Horse hold a special place in our hearts here. Their last album The Grand Scheme of Things was the second record we ever featured on our website, a devastating and beautiful exploration of personal grief. Not a Sound in Heaven takes that grief and expands it to a vast geopolitical scale. More than anything that came before it, the album is a sludge metal record almost from start to finish. Those detours into melody and atmosphere are still here, and they’re extraordinary, but they feel harder won and more devastating for the noise that surrounds them.

The album opens with Fire Graphics, announcing its intentions immediately with a brute concrete march that’s militaristic and violent. Oppressive and distorted, it sounds like demolition, and yet for all the desolation and harsh noise you’re nodding your head. Secret Speech follows, opening with a delicate drum machine and some gentle pads before a bulldozer of sludge flattens everything in sight, with riffs so grimy that it’s difficult to tell whether the band are playing chords or simply making ambiguous noise. The track alternates between held-back verses floating in a treble register and crushing, blunt choruses that carry the unmistakable influence of Godflesh in the sheer brute insistence of the drumming, with absolutely no flash. The track keeps growing and getting bigger, suddenly dropping everything back to a quiet ambient wash and slamming back in again.

Ex-Human Shield is probably the clearest and most perfected expression of what Sugar Horse do. It’s really, really slow with grinding guitars that could easily have come off a Swans record with vocalist Ash Tubb far more interested in sounding feral than sounding metal when he screams. And then at a minute and a half everything changes as the drums and bass vanish. An enormous cathedral reverb fills the space and a stunningly beautiful chorus arrives summoning Tears For Fears into the wreckage. The refrain speaks to the inescapability of capitalism and the performance demanded of every one of us for the benefit of those who hold the money. It’s emotionally overwhelming, beautiful and brutal.

The centrepiece History’s Biggest T-Shirts is a profound accomplishment. With a fast drumline, glittering synths and a vocal line that channels Killing Joke at their most tender, the crushing sludge metal arrives at the two-minute mark and then suspends itself in the air for five huge, extraordinary, reverb-drenched minutes in a wash of noise that’s far too loud to be called ambient. When the drums re-enter and Ash’s choral vocal finally arrives the effect is magnificent, desolate and awe-inspiring.

The title track functions as a ballad where the new wave influence comes to the surface and something approaching hope is allowed to breathe. Company Town returns to Godflesh territory with another searing capitalist critique and the album then closes with You Can’t Say Dallas Doesn’t Love You, ten minutes that move through enormous doom metal before arriving at a tender and quiet, piano-led outro where everything is played softly and the rage gives way to something sadder and more reflective. The lyrics throughout the album are symbolic but factual, dealing in fire and burning. Not a Sound in Heaven sounds like the mass destruction of the modern age.

A brilliant experimental rock album from one of the most singular bands this country has produced in years, so much of this record operates at a relentless weight that when the album finally allows itself to be quiet the effect is devastating, and the moments that might pass for triumphant only underline how much darkness surrounds them. The lyrics are extraordinarily considered, trafficking in poetic and symbolic images and yet absolutely, observably true.

Not a Sound in Heaven is an extraordinary record for fans of heavy guitar music drawn directly from the world outside the window that hits harder than almost anything else you will hear this year.