Long Live the King!

Air, hair, lair…the King’s Birthday long weekend was good to me this year. With sales running at both Real Groovy and JB Hi-Fi, it seemed almost irresponsible not to pick up a few records. Pretty eclectic haul in the end, spanning volcanic drone metal, long-awaited electronic brilliance, and a death metal classic on wicked coloured vinyl.

Sunn O))) – Sunn O))) + Eternity’s Pillars b/w Raise the Chalice & Reverential (Real Groovy)

The self-titled album has been one of the most anticipated heavy releases in years, and Real Groovy had it in stock, so it seemed like a good excuse to grab both the album and the maxi-single while I was there.

Sunn O))) is the band’s tenth studio album and their debut for Sub Pop, recorded at Bear Creek Studios in Washington State with producer Brad Wood. It’s their first full album of new material since 2019’s Pyroclasts, and it sounds like a band who spent those years thinking carefully about what they actually want to say. Six tracks, nearly eighty minutes, draped in Mark Rothko paintings on the sleeve and liner notes by author Robert Macfarlane. A serious artistic statement even before the needle drops. Musically it delivers exactly what you want: dense, snarling walls of distortion with breathing feedback. But there’s always precision in Sunn O))), a sense of controlled enormity that feels new.

The maxi-single, Eternity’s Pillars b/w Raise the Chalice & Reverential, was released on Sub Pop in late 2025 and works as a great companion piece, arriving just before the album and featuring only the core duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson on heavily saturated electric guitars and synthesis. “Raise the Chalice” in particular is a gloomy, urgent descent into the abyss, the droning riffs shifting more frequently than you’d expect, building to a hovering, insistent presence above the mix. At over thirty minutes total, it is of course a very Sunn O))) kind of “single.”

Boards of Canada – Inferno (JB Hi-Fi, Limited Red Vinyl)

Thirteen years since Tomorrow’s Harvest, and the wait for Inferno has been the kind of slow-burn anticipation that borders on mythological, almost like waiting for the new Om album… The album dropped on 29 May 2026 via Warp Records, and JB had the limited red vinyl edition in: transparent red, pressed in a triple gatefold sleeve with a 16-page booklet. It looks genuinely stunning. I had to go to a couple of branches to pick it up actually, my close local one was out of stock.

The album centres on memory fragmentation, technological anxiety, and something approaching apocalyptic dread, themes that feel very of-the-moment for Marcus Eoin and Mike Sandison, siblings who rarely perform and almost never speak to the press. Track titles like “Hydrogen Helium Lithium Leviathan,” “Memory Death,” and “Blood in the Labyrinth” give you a sense of the tone: darker and more cosmological than their earlier work, nodding back to the occult undertow of Geogaddi. Critics have been losing their minds over it, and rightly so.

The real treasure in this edition is the hexagonal flexi disc tucked inside the booklet. It’s a beautifully strange little thing, labelled as Vol. 4 – P. Primers – 177 Giraud’s Mirror Ascension, purportedly recorded at the “MWGYF Conference, 28 August 1983,” with “Made in Canada” printed on the back. Pure Boards of Canada mythology-building, the kind of detail that sends the fan community into a frenzy of speculation for months. Even the shape, a hexagon, an image the duo have used across their visual history, feels deliberate. It’s the sort of thing you hold in your hands and feel like you’ve unearthed something that wasn’t meant to be found.

Death – Human (JB Hi-Fi, Blue/White/Gold Splatter Vinyl)

A different flavour to round out the haul. Death’s Human from 1991 is one of the most important metal albums ever made, the record where Chuck Schuldiner pivoted toward technical, progressive complexity and changed the genre forever. The lineup is extraordinary: Sean Reinert on drums, Paul Masvidal on guitar, and Steve DiGiorgio on fretless bass, all of whom would go on to form Cynic. It sounds like nothing else from that era of death metal, introspective and technically staggering in equal measure.

JB had it in on a very nice bone white, blue jay, and metallic gold splatter pressing from Relapse Records, housed in a silver foil laminated jacket. It’s been available in various colour variants for a while now, but this colourway is particularly striking, the kind of vinyl that looks almost too good to play. Almost.

A solid weekend all told. The King’s Birthday sales made each of these a little easier to justify. It was worth leaving the safe confines of my house to brave the hoardes, and the traffic, to pick these up.