Sulfate – Aqui
Sulfate have announced their third album And It Wants, out October 23 on Flying Nun Records. “Aqui” is the first thing we’ve heard from it, and at nearly seven minutes it takes its time getting where it’s going.
Peter Ruddell has traded an elaborate keyboard rig for an electric guitar and as few pedals as he can get away with. Zac Arnold’s arrival on bass is the other big change, since he plays in walls rather than lines. David Harris gets a lot of room on the kit, and Hariet Ellis sings backing vocals.
Structurally, “Aqui” moves in stages. A nasal vocal drone opens it, spiky post-punk takes over in the middle, and the last stretch collapses into something slow and heavy. Ruddell’s subject is the cost of trying to postpone death: the lyrics keep reaching for surgical fixes and symmetry, for optimising everything and enjoying none of it. There is an image of a plastic sheet weighted down at the corners with rocks in a muddy field, holding until the ground itself shifts and tears it. A flat, repeated line about everyone crying and everyone hurting closes the song out, and it lands harder than something that plain has any right to.
