A few weeks back, Ears to Feed premiered the video for “A Nameless Influence” from Sunk Heaven’s upcoming album THE FVCKHEAѪTED LVNG. Today, we’re thrilled to be premiering Austin Sley-Julian’s incredible new record in full. THE FVCKHEAѪTED LVNG is out on American Dreams Records this Friday, August 6.
Sunk Heaven’s latest feels like falling into a bottomless well, one with barbed walls, lined with jagged rust and crooked nails. Using handmade instruments, artifacts, debris and prepared guitar, Sunk Heaven shapes din into dirge-paced rhythms and harsh melodies, offering a captivatingly bleak soundscape from start to finish.
Sley-Julian’s multidisciplinary background informs Sunk Heaven’s approach. Combined with the project’s disparate sonic palate, THE FVCKHEAѪTED LVNG occupies space between sound art and song, making for an intense and transportive listen. The record’s liminal nature captures the aspects of isolation through visceral electronics and grating, gyrating vocal performances. Sley-Julian offered the significance of the lungfish in relation to THE FVCKHEAѪTED LVNG and our most idle year:
“Lungfish survive severe drought by laying dormant in dry mud within a membrane until the rain – the emergence of the dormant lungfish from under the drought-ridden mud represents the garish reality of our times, uncovering the thin veil it wore for so long.”
THE FVCKHEAѪTED LVNG is a hand thrust through the ice sheet. It’s an offering and a rebirth, one of liberation and escape. Sunk Heaven’s appeal provides the means to breach a callused stasis, as the record questions and examines isolation for survival and self-preservation. “Fortitude ” offers creativity as remedy for extended inactivity, while “A Nameless Influence” is a nod to the sleeping minds co-opted by the nefarious powers which ceaselessly perpetuate and enact mass violence.
The record is momentous, as Sunk Heaven plunges into cavernous synths on “Coiling Devises,” reincarnates with Rachael Uhlir on “Phoenix” and grates away on highlight closer “Shine.” THE FVCKHEAѪTED LVNG is moulting music, best listened in full. Listen to be peeled.
Stream THE FVCKHEAѪTED LVNG below and pick it up from American Dreams this Friday, August 6.