Photo by Paulo Gonzales
“I think I’ve always wanted to be challenged as a musician, and it’s much more challenging for me to have to constantly reevaluate what a song is,” says Sumac guitarist and vocalist Aaron Turner. “That’s ultimately more gratifying than knowing exactly what’s coming next.”
Improvisation plays a major role in Sumac, the sludgy, avant-garde metal band Turner plays in with bassist Brian Cook and drummer Nick Yacyshyn. What started in 2014 as a Pacific Northwest supergroup featuring members of Isis, Old Man Gloom (Turner), Russian Circles, Botch (Cook), and Baptists (Yacyshyn) has since become one of the most formidable and truly crushing bands in the heavy music underground. Over the last decade, Sumac built an impressive catalog based on long compositions, beefy riffs, jazz-like improvisation, and lyrical themes that offer a humanistic foil to the standard metal triumvirate of death, violence, and Satanism.
Sumac’s fifth album, The Healer, is the apotheosis of their trajectory thus far. Comprised of four songs clocking in at a total of an hour and 16 minutes, it contains some of the most bruising, challenging, and lyrically uplifting music you’ll hear this year—or any year. Below, we spoke with Turner about The Healer, subverting the subversive, and Sumac’s upcoming appearance at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival.
Why did you decide to call this album The Healer?
In a way, I see this record tied into the last two full-lengths as sort of a loosely correlating trilogy. Some very specific things happened with the first record in that pseudo-trilogy, [Sumac’s 2018 album] Love in Shadow. A lot of it starts with my career as a heavy music musician to begin with. I’ve always been interested in subverting what is already a subversive art form, and so much metal music revolves around themes of destruction and violence and warfare and prurience and perversion and Satanism and all that shit. And while I’m interested in the dark side of existence, and that’s part of what drew me to metal in the first place, the redundancy of that subject matter and what I felt it was contributing to the world—or rather not contributing to the world—became more and more apparent to me. So, I wanted to take the subject matter that I was working with as a lyricist and a band director in a different direction.
I’d say that while it’s not necessarily trite, hippy-dippy peace and love themes, it isn’t that far removed from it, either. I was thinking about connection and how art has the potential to be a transformative tool and a transformative practice. I was thinking about the fact that, as a band, you have the opportunity and the platform to put forth ideas that may in some way or another affect the people who come into contact with it. Within that context, I realized that what I wanted to put out there ultimately had to do with wanting to make a positive impact in the world.
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How does that tie in with Love in Shadow?
When Love in Shadow was being written, it was shortly after the birth of our son, and I was thinking about what I wanted to be as a father, and how I was going to, by default, be a guide for him. I was thinking about him as an inheritor to this world that our generation has been a part of building or dismantling in some ways. So, that was part of the impetus. And I was also just looking at all the social upheaval that was going on at the time, and the current state of our country under our former and possibly soon-to-be-again president. That just tipped the scales in the direction of not wanting to contribute to more negativity and glorification of violence and destruction. I know this is a super long-winded answer, but it also goes to the heart of what we’re trying to do with this band and this record.
How so?
Metal was interesting when I got into it partly because I felt that it was an examination of the dark side of humanity. In a way, it was sort of an avenue to exorcise those things that plague us or cause us to self-destruct or possibly become destructive towards each other. But then I just felt like there was this whole wave of trendy nihilism that had arisen in various forms of underground music—not just metal—this whole idea of, ‘Fuck it, nothing is worth caring about. I’m just gonna be cool and affect this idea that I don’t care about myself or care about life.’ And that was aggravating to me. Even more so than the war metal that’s just lyrics about people slaughtering each other. That, to me, is more in the realm of fantasy.
I feel like what I want out of life has to be exemplified by what I’m making as an artist. I’m ultimately a believer in humanity and a proponent of humanity. I feel that art can be very powerful and transformative and radical, but so much of what I was witnessing in music was not making use of that power. Now we’re in this whole sorta-post-Covid realm, where people have delved further into their devices and social media and this kind of fractured consciousness that’s born out of all that, and it seems to me that people’s ability to connect with each other in the post-Covid world has been further diminished. So, I really want our music to function for us as a way to connect with one another and also as a way to connect with people who are participating in this process of listening and creating with us.
So, that’s the idea: What can we offer the world in this post-Covid time where everybody is dealing with this influx of fucked up information and fucked up events and disconnection? Hopefully we’re offering something that allows people to go the other direction and look for avenues to connect to themselves, to recover from trauma, to find joy in life and find healing and find a sense of purpose specifically within the context of making art or experiencing art but also well beyond those borders.
You released “Yellow Dawn” as the lead single from The Healer. Why did you choose that to be the first thing people would hear from the album?
I didn’t. Thrill Jockey chose it. I have been overly controlling at times with what happens with the art that I participate in making, to the point that it was stressful to me and probably stressful for the people on the other end—in this case, Thrill Jockey. Ultimately, I thought I wouldn’t have committed any of this to record if I didn’t believe in it, so I’m just gonna let them pick. Usually at that stage, I’m at a point where I can’t be objective about it, and there’s no single song that I feel is an accurate representation of the whole, so whatever they feel like is the good doorway for people to enter the record through is fine by me. I made the work to the best of my ability, as I believe the other guys did, too. Beyond that, we have very little control over how people absorb it from this point forward, so I’m just trying to let it go be whatever it’s gonna be in the world. Letting the label choose the single was part of that letting go.
Structurally, the album is kind of like a palindrome. There’s a 26-minute song followed by two 13-minute songs and then a 25-minute song. I’m assuming that’s intentional, but why did you set it up that way?
It’s not intentional in terms of having the longer bookends on either side, but it is intentional in terms of how the pieces flow in and out of each other. Album construction has always been really important to me, and I’ve tried, with most records I’ve been a part of—especially with bands that are long-running, deeply-invested projects such as this—to build things that have a very tangible trajectory to them and feel purposeful in their pacing. That’s how we arrived at this particular track order. It wasn’t so much the duration as the way each of these things created some kind of linear narrative when they were placed in that specific order. I’ve found in many cases when it gets to the stage of figuring out track order, there’s almost always an order that is suggested or in some way almost predetermined. We had a little bit of debate about how to pace the front end, but after ‘World of Light’ was suggested as the opener—as challenging and rough as that intro is—it also was undeniably the best way for the record to be put together. It made sense.
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Album sequencing is becoming a lost art in the streaming age. Many bands seem to not care very much about it—or have simply accepted the fact that most listeners will be hearing individual tracks on playlists or as part of an algorithm, rather than entire albums in their intended running order. You seem to be actively resisting that trend.
Nothing we’re doing is capitulating to modern listening habits. We’ve accepted the fact that we’re just gonna exist in this very niche zone that will probably only be appreciated by a handful of people. While I would love for us to be a massively popular band, there’s nothing in our artistic choices that is working in that direction. [Laughs] I think about what I would like to hear as a listener, and that’s the perspective I’ve had for most of the projects I’ve been involved in. That’s what I’m working towards. My hope is that if something is really appealing to me and feels right on an intuitive level, that will be true for people who have sensibilities that are akin to my own. I know we’re not a mainstream band and our tastes are not conventional, but I also know that there are plenty of other people out there who are looking for something that is more demanding and something that requires more of them and something that is ultimately less disposable and more satisfying because of the work that goes into interfacing with it.
In our last interview, we talked about your predilection for longer songs. Is there anything you can remember listening to that maybe helped to push you in that direction?
Yeah, for sure. I can think of two records in particular that I think of as coming-of-age records for me. They weren’t the first things I heard that excited me, but they were the first things I heard at a moment when my consciousness was evolving in a certain way and my ability at playing music was developing in a pretty significant way. This would’ve been pre-teens to early teens, and the two records I’m thinking of are [The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s] Electric Ladyland and [Metallica’s] …And Justice for All. In a certain way, if you listen to Sumac and you think about what would happen if you smashed those two records together, and kinda funneled them towards the future with the other things that developed a little later on, it’s not too far off the mark. And when I say that I’m not putting myself in league with those musicians. I’m just offering a contextual guide.
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Improvisation plays a significant part in Sumac. Why is that important?
That’s important to me partially in connection to what I like about the Hendrix stuff. It’s people following the trajectory that the song is suggesting and allowing it to take shape moment by moment. I realized after years of touring and playing the same songs the same way that that was actually kinda soul-sucking for me because it changed my role from that of musician to that of performer. The distinction being that the musician presents music and the performer recreates an idea that is essentially for other people. I don’t need my music to be entirely for me—I don’t want it to be—but at the same time I also feel like if I’m invigorated and connected to what I’m doing, it’s going to be more meaningful for the people that are witnessing it. There’re exceptions to that—some people just wanna hear a very specific thing—but for the most part, I’ve hopefully been a part of bands that don’t necessarily cultivate that kind of audience expectation.
So, for me, it helped to think about the music as something that should be malleable, especially in the live context. Allowing it that possibility for continued change made it more exciting for me to participate in the repetitive way of doing it night after night on tour. Playing the same songs the same way every night, I found myself tuning out to the music I was playing, which is the opposite of what I want as a performer.
It’s the jazz approach.
Yeah. While I didn’t embrace that initially, I did grow up hearing a lot of jazz through my dad. And though in that early phase it was my father’s music—and therefore irrelevant [laughs]—just the fact that I was immersed in it, did, I think, shape my musical consciousness. Eventually, I became a big appreciator of jazz on my own once I started resisting it as my parents’ music. And a lot of jazz records play with that boundary between structure and improvisation. Themes are introduced and dispensed with, and there’s a whole bunch of variables that can arise within those improvised performances, and then maybe the theme is played again at the end. So, it has these boundaries around aspects or portions of it, but it also has the freedom to go in whatever direction the players deem important. And while I would never call us a jazz band, I certainly think all three of us have had our musical sensibilities shaped by jazz. We’ve actively discussed jazz records and jazz musicians we appreciate and how some of those sensibilities or approaches can be applied to what we’re doing.
Speaking of jazz, Sumac is playing the Vancouver International Jazz Festival this summer. I feel like that might be a place where you guys are going to really stand out.
[Laughs] Yeah. And I’m happy to feel like a sore thumb in a certain way. Maybe this is all part of some unresolved, childish, contrary part of who I am, but the desire to be provocative and challenge people is interesting to me. A lot of the bands I’ve been a part of, I hope they’ve been provocative in that way—where it wasn’t easily pigeonholed into one space or another. So, this feels appropriate along that historical trajectory. Similarly, I feel like we would be out of place on a typical metal festival. We might appeal to a portion of the crowd, but just as many people would be annoyed by the fact that we’re not a rigidly structured band, we’re making use of improvisation, and all that stuff. So maybe this is just another place for us to try to test ourselves, test the audience, and hopefully reel people in and kinda break down some of those boundaries about what is or isn’t appropriate for a given context.
