May You Be Held

Featuring guitarist/vocalist Aaron Turner (Old Man Gloom, ex-Isis), bassist Brian Cook (Russian Circles, ex-Botch), and drummer Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists), Sumac is a metallic supergroup that specializes in bone-rattling riffs, lengthy compositions, and general uneasy listening. They’re also incredibly prolific: Since debuting in 2015, they’ve released four albums and an EP. *May You Be Held* is very much a continuation of the trio’s last album, 2018’s *Love in Shadow*. “Some of the foundation of this record was built off things that were recorded during the *Love in Shadow* sessions,” Turner tells Apple Music. “And there were lyrical themes I was working on with the last record that I felt didn’t cover the full extent of what I was trying to express. That record really came together right around the time of our last presidential election, which was, in my view, a turning point in our American culture. Everything that kind of started there has only grown and become more exacerbated in the intervening years, so I felt like there was more to say.” Below, Turner takes us through the twists and turns of *May You Be Held*. **A Prayer for Your Path** “This was the very last thing that was recorded when we were in the studio, and even before we mixed it I immediately felt like this had to be the opening to the album. Luckily, Brian and Nick agreed. It’s got an enveloping atmosphere but also this kind of peripheral tension to it. It seemed like a gentle opening into the world of this record, which is actually pretty tumultuous and even pretty caustic at a number of points. So we wanted to ease people into what is overall a pretty rough ride at times.” **May You Be Held** “The opening riff for the song just kind of sounds like an AC/DC riff, and I wasn’t sure how that fit into the parameters of what we do as Sumac. Yet the more I played it and the more I thought about the impactful simplicity of it, the more I felt that my discomfort with it was an indicator that it needed to be pursued. And by the time we had fleshed it out as a band, the AC/DC comparison had diminished quite considerably. Lyrically speaking, the song is kind of divided into two halves. The first half is centered around my fear of the future on an existential level, but also on an individual level, as it pertains to being a parent. After having brought a child into this world and looking at what the world is like at the moment, I can\'t help but think forward to what the future is going to be like for his generation. The second half of the song addresses the idea that regardless of what does happen, I have zero control over the path that we take collectively, and that my son has his own path before him.” **The Iron Chair** “Thrill Jockey suggested this song as a ‘single,’ and even though we are in no way a singles band, we agreed that offering this tangled piece as an introduction to the album felt like the right move. Given the climate that we’re all in currently, it also seemed appropriate because \[this song\] is a way of kind of harmonizing the inner state with our external world. Things are confusing right now, and nothing is familiar in the sense of what we\'ve been accustomed to up to this point. And for me, there\'s no immediately obvious emotional signifiers for this song. It covers a wide range in terms of the emotional directives in it, so I felt like that was a good way to sort of lay the groundwork for the record emerging into the world.” **Consumed** “Brian pointed out something interesting about the contrast of the two kind of pillars of the record, ‘May You Be Held’ and ‘Consumed,’ in that ‘May You Be Held’ starts off kind of frantic and then diminishes into this very bleak and almost barren anti-structure by the end, and this song is kind of the opposite—it starts out slowly and very minimal but by the end kind of escalates into this blown-out frenzy. That wasn\'t intentional, but when we look back on the record as a whole, it\'s kind of neat to see that arc having happened again on a totally subconscious level.” **Laughter and Silence** “It’s interesting to try to title instrumental tracks. This may seem like a trivial example, but there is something that I\'ve observed in children, and this was even before having a child of my own: The moment of greatest exhilaration and laughter and energy and exuberance is often immediately followed by a violent accident and tears. And I feel like that speaks to the human experience in a lot of ways—and also the present moment we’re in, which of course means different things for many people. But I just feel like we have had to take a prolonged silence and breath to look at where we are and more deeply consider the result of being thrust into isolation and separation—and also upheaval.”

“As an artist in this time of significant upheaval, society seemingly having reached the end of its current iteration, it’s of critical importance to absorb and interpret this process of dissolution - and of the transformation that hopefully follows it” says Aaron Turner, guitarist and vocalist for the expressionistic metal ensemble SUMAC. “While I don’t believe we’re on the brink of collective destruction precisely now, this is clearly a pivotal stage in the story of humankind - and there is something that feels right about this music at this exact and very uncertain moment.” In this case, the music in discussion is May You Be Held, the latest album for the American-Canadian trio. Picking up where the band left off with 2018’s Love in Shadow, SUMAC push further into the extreme polarity of their sound with their latest collection of long-form composition and free-form exploration. Meticulously detailed and complex one moment, rudimentary and repetitive the next, and completely untethered and unscripted at seemingly random intervals—it’s an album that fluctuates between extreme discipline and control on one end and an almost feral energy on the other. SUMAC’s work has always been about transition between different states of being. Our sense of normal, and indeed our sense of life, is now being shaken. We don’t know what is coming next. We are looking for pointers towards the future, as well as things to hold onto in the moment. This is a fundamental aspect of May You Be Held’s larger theme. Musically, it’s about continual unification and divergence—and is imbued with the uncertainty inherent in that cycle. In that uncertainty there is also hope, frustration, madness, and a desire for connection. All this too is part of this moment in our history—everything happening at once, the simultaneous emergence of humanity's best and worst characteristics. Lyrically, May You Be Held follows the humanistic themes explored on Love in Shadow, partially informed by Turner’s navigation of fatherhood and family life. “It’s clear humans have figured out many ways over the centuries to acclimate to adverse circumstances, and even to thrive in them,” Turner says. “My hope for our family, humanity and future generations, is that we find our way by doing what we have always done—invent, adapt, band together, and ideally, hold each other up through love and kindness.” This compassionate tone stands in stark contrast to the misanthropic and death-obsessed nature of most heavy metal music, and perhaps even seems diametric to the caustic and aggravated tone of May You Be Held. It may make more sense to approach the album as if it were a free jazz record or an abstract noise piece, where the emotional resonance isn’t bound up in melody as much as it is in performance. Here, Turner’s bellows and howls seem less threatening than wounded, primal, and mammalian. On guitar, his subversion of melody and penchant for noise seems less like aural punishment and more like an open horizon for frequencies and timbre. In a traditional metal context, drummer Nick Yacyshyn’s dexterous beats, exhilarating fills, and creative flourishes might seem like the pinnacle of rhythmic ferocity, but on May You Be Held there’s a kind of ecstasy in his performance, a fluidity and ability that conveys both urgency in purpose and joy in execution. Bassist Brian Cook glues it together with a heavy handedness that could be seen as hostile or malicious if it didn’t also provide the clearest path to navigating the band’s thorny arrangements. May You Be Held opens with “A Prayer for Your Path,” a composition culled from improvisational exercises centered on the interplay between Turner’s guitar drones and Yacyshyn’s bowing of a vibraphone. Threaded together with warming bass swells, it serves as the entry point for the album’s increasingly tumultuous and unpredictable strategies. The album’s title track is more in line with SUMAC’s established tactics: fusing heavy riffage, knotty structures, and expressionistic forays into an epic narrative arc that winds and weaves through so many peaks and valleys that it spills across two sides of an LP. The band’s free moments hit their apex with “The Iron Chair,” a fully unscripted spontaneous moment in the studio that sounds both completely uninhibited while also locking into some kind of alien logic. From there SUMAC launches into their second long-form orchestrated composition—the imposing “Consumed.” The track is perhaps their most ambitious work yet, morphing and evolving across multiple recording sessions at different locations over the course of several years until reaching its final form where SUMAC’s troglodyte force slowly ramps it up over its twenty-minute run time to a near panic-inducing frenzy. The album is bookended with a final improvisation exercise, the somber and subdued “Laughter and Silence.” While past SUMAC records have been concentrated efforts churned out in short flurries of activity, May You Be Held is a record that came from seemingly out of nowhere. Pieced together from vestiges of the Love in Shadow session with Kurt Ballou at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline WA, a session at The Unknown recording studio in Anacortes with Matt Bayles at the engineering helm (where the band’s sophomore album What One Becomes was tracked), and supplementary work at House of Low Culture out on Vashon Island in the Puget Sound, May You Be Held reflects the temporal shifts and protracted scope of its genesis. It’s a record that feels more human than anything else—at times flawed and wounded, at others, triumphant, purposeful, and pensive. The music is by no means a salve or anodyne, but neither is it nihilistic. Rather, its forceful approach and challenging timbres are like a confrontation, a baptism by fire, a therapeutic razing. Ultimately, May You Be Held is a reminder of the life force that binds us together and a clarion call to be an active participant in an evolving world.

Returning with mightier riffs and wilder improvisations than ever, the trio offers a spiritual vision of metal, one well timed to a moment of crisis.

Like previous albums by post-metal trio SUMAC, May You Be Held is a set of hulking long-form pieces which balance carefully considered sections with free-form improvisation.

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A good chunk of May You Be Held finds Sumac leaving metal behind in favor of non-linear, textural explorations.