New Music: Sugar Horse – Company Town

Bristol’s Sugar Horse are not a metal or indie band. It’s easy to see and hear why their music has found favour with the likes of Metal Hammer, but also Brooklyn Vegan, however.

Company Town, from the band’s new album, Not A Sound In Heaven, has a sonic brutality to it that is in keeping with the tone of the lyrics, remaining as clean and clear as the message within the lyrics.

They’ve been labelled as doom and sludge in the past, and I can detect weight and temperament within Company Town that wouldn’t be amiss in the early days of what become post-punk, scorching riffs and tribal beats, even as fans of Prong and Paradise Lost will just as easily find themselves enraptured by Sugar Horse.

Here, and elsewhere on the album, the band dissects the way in which the world is being fractured to profit a few, and the choices facing the supposedly civilised West and crisis after crisis of our own making makes existence ever more fraught for many of us. It’s direct, devastating and a vital record of where we are in 2026.

Not A Sound In Heaven came out on the 10^th of April via the band’s own label, Fat Dracula, and can be found in vinyl and CD editions on Bandcamp. The band has just finished a UK tour in support for the album, so details of upcoming live events, check out their Instagram and Blue Sky feeds.