Review by Sonny for Cult of Luna - The Raging River (2021)

A five-track, 38 minute EP (why not just call it an album and have done with it?) that truly lives up to the atmo-sludge tag and starts off strong, but gets better and better as it proceeds, building up to the climax of the twelve-minute closer, the awesome Wave After Wave. A crushingly heavy atmosphere perpetuates throughout, but this is no stilted sludge-bomb, maintaining velocity as it is driven forward thanks to the thrusters provided by Thomas Hedlund's kinetic drumming. The only real niggle is the loss of impetus that results from the still air surrounding the Mark Lanegan-featured track Inside of a Dream, but it's not a bad track and does provide a counterpoint to the furious, raging  behemoth that surrounds it.
Overall an organic-sounding album that feels forged by the laws of Einsteinian physics and possesses a planet-killing potential energy. Me, I just had to jump onto Bandcamp and get myself a vinyl copy - it deserves that at least.