(For the second day in a row we have a review from DGR that delves into sludge/doom, and the subject today is a February 2026 EP released by the UK band Sunk.)
The good ship NoCleanSinging, when taken out by your present captain here, will lower its trawl into the oceans of heavy metal and dredge up a variety of releases over the course of the year. So many are absorbed into its maw that there is always going to be something waiting in the wings to be covered whenever we can find time to eke one out. Combined with our desperately flailing attempts to stay current with what is coming out, we inevitably end up swamped, and so many of the reviews from yours truly will be focused on stuff that came out months ago that seem to be going unsung, yet still managed to capture the eye and ear.
Britain’s Sunk and their EP From The Abyss is one such release that managed to capture attention earlier in the year, and now we are grateful for the time to circle back and actually discuss this release as it proves that sludge isn’t just something we dredge up and clean out of our ship’s trawl, but is also something that has seen quite a bit of explosive growth in the last few years.
You may have caught last year that Andy Synn and myself were absolutely giddy with excitement over the release of Finnish band Themata’s Riven EP – well, giddy in the sense that me: American, jumping with excitement and effervescent, Andy: British, stoic, still very excited but attempting not to show it save for the occasional eye twitch that looks as if he stepped on something sharp and hasn’t found it in his shoe yet – but one has to wonder if the heavy, gargantuan groove of that EP was serving as a vanguard of a much larger movement that we didn’t see coming yet, one that is only just now congealing into form as something of an early 2026 doom and sludge explosion.
Britain’s Sunk – other than the fact that they’ve somehow managed to find a one-word band name in the year of our Lourde 2026 – captured both eyes and ears off of the fact that their EP From The Abyss is built out of equally large groove and massive riff work, all set to steady, plodding tempos that are heavy due to their unceasing precision and rhythmic hypnotism, not due to overwhelming bombast or rapid-fire bass-drum hammering. It is heavy in the same way industrial is heavy, as if you are being fed feet-first into the grinding of slow moving gears.
Sunk emerge from oceanic waters with a much purer strain – or a nearby pond – of sludge by way of doom-tempo than the aforementioned groove-mongers. While other bands work heavily in realms of hybridization, From The Abyss’ seven songs and twenty-eight minutes worth of music are all about the downward thrust and stomp. Sunk are more blues and psychedelia inspired than the album title suggests; the band could easily brawl in death metal and doom metal worlds but it’s the constant bending in their guitar riffs that keeps pulling the band back into a much purer strain of genre than attempted hybridization.
The vocals and subject matter are both suitably mean and deep, with bellows emanating from the sea floor itself at times – fitting for the murderous “Megalodon” song – but it is all subject matter draped in allegory and comparison rather than being a doctoral thesis on the dangers of the deep. From The Abyss has no qualms about being heavy, but much of that musical lifting strength comes from traditional altars of worship that Sunk are paying respect to.
The music on From The Abyss has had a long time in the hopper and it shows, as Sunk have been around since 2023 with lineup shifts throughout until this current recorded form. These gentlemen have been in and out of music for a bit as well, with their own biography listing a handful of different projects, some of which were of a similar vein, so the natural conclusion is that even for a debut EP From The Abyss already sounds as if Sunk have been doing this for decades.
Songs like “Despot” and “Renewing” are both built on massive foundations and prowl through their four minutes apiece with an on-razor’s-edge tension to them. “Despot” is the more outwardly explosive of the two, which is where its auditory protagonist takes the reins of the song, in that the song is not accusatory in a grind sense but the viewpoint of someone violently destructive and a tyrant on their own.
Opener “Slaves To The Mast” is the most up-front about Sunk’s nautical nature. However, this is not an album of sea-shanty gimmickry in spite of our own joking descriptions in the opening bits. “Cloaked In Shame” reports for duty as the second to last song on From The Abyss yet is a near-twin of opener “Slaves To The Mast” – both are about three-minutes-and-fourteen-seconds long – with a similar shared rhythmic dedication between the two. The difference, however, where “Cloaked In Shame” gets to be the spicier younger sibling lies in the parts wherein Sunk pick it up for the briefest of seconds and a chaotic, verging-on-noise lead-guitar segment that serves as the main “melody” for the back half of the song.
One of the key points where you can tell if one of these releases is solid on first glance is if it sounds like monstrous footfalls. So many groups miss this part, favoring a reverb-drenched fuzzed-out groove and somewhat burying their rhythm section as if Sabbath’s mythical bounce didn’t come from that exact sort of walking-groove. While our more death-obsessed brethren in the metal scene have taken their worship of giant monsters making landfall into literal music form, it is in the doom segments that bands actually seem capable of capturing those terrifying moments of step-after-suffocating-step. It captures the slow, grinding nature that can frighten someone in the same way Godflesh have learned to create heavy atmospheres by virtue of overwhelming repetition.
Sunk have that gargantuan groove and footfall down to a ‘T’. They’ve hit every single one of those checkpoints on the way to creating a great debut EP in the form of From The Abyss. It is completely dedicated in its pursuit of the sludged-out branches of the doom tree so the genre-appeal will be laser-focused, but the hefty roar the band deploys alongside that dogged repetition makes for a consistently heavy headbanging experience. That the band declares this to be not a “proper” studio recording is interesting, because it means they’re going to be maniacally capable of creating an absolute monster when they get the time to do so.