Review by Sonny for Ufomammut - Hidden (2024)

If you don't know what to expect from a new Ufomammut album by now, then you really haven't been paying attention. By this stage Ufomammut are a band who have a firmly established style and long ago perfected the recipe to deliver whatever they wish to express with their music, so if you haven't been seduced by the sounds this italian trio produce by now, then this won't do anything to change your opinion and you are probably best moving along.

So anyway, if you are still with me, Hidden is the Italians' eleventh full-length album and comprises six tracks of their trademark spacey, sludgy stoner metal. Blasting straight off with the ten-minute Crookhead, they make their intentions known with a mighty stoner riff that possesses a thundering roar usually only produced by a NASA rocket during take off. The key to Ufomammut's sound is the extreme distortion applied to both six- and four-strings and the driving nature of the riffs and rhythm section that propel a huge wall of sound with an irresistible kineticism, perfectly illustrated here on the opener. Combine this with the restrained, washed-out vocals and the inclusion of an arsenal of electronic beeps and squiggles and you have an exceedingly effective metal approximation of a rocket journey through space, with old "Space Ritual"-era Hawkwind being a quite obvious influence. Yet, despite all the spacey, wacked-out, stoner vibes, Ufomammut are also ridiculously heavy and when they slow the tempo down, the seismic ripples they generate could topple office blocks. Just check out the middle heavy section of the otherwise creepy-sounding second track, "Kismet", if you need an illustration of just how ball-crushingly heavy the trio can be.

For me, the attraction of Ufomammut is that they are a band in whose album's I can lose myself and just mentally float, drinking in the cosmic atmosphere that they create without having to ponder the context or the nuances of what the band are trying to convey. The experience is the point with these Italians, not the need to marvel at their ingenuity or technical prowess and that really is the mark of success for any stoner-adjacent band, the ability to be able to transport the listener to an alternative state of being through the expression of their art and if that is how I am to judge them, then I would have to declare Hidden to be an unqualified success.