From the start, Sumac has welcomed abundance. Singer and guitarist Aaron Turner, an omnivorous multi-disciplinary artist with some 20 musical projects to his name, feeds all of his storied past into his band with drummer Nick Yacyshyn and bassist Brian Cook. When the Pacific Northwest supergroup debuted in 2015 with The Deal, their songs were already knotty hybrids of sludge, hardcore, noise, death metal, and beyond. And each subsequent record has sounded increasingly unsatisfied with keeping pure the tenets of heavy rock’s subgenres. Whether building or deconstructing, Sumac’s open-ended metal continuously seeks to incorporate more and more and more.
For all their indulgences, Sumac are veteran musicians in absolute control, whose improvisations are as exact and technically proficient as their dense, circuitous songwriting. This has never been so bluntly apparent as it is on The Healer, the trio’s fifth full-length. Sumac doubles down on everything that made them one of the most fascinating metal bands in recent memory. Grimier chords, longer and weirder freeform jams, utterly confounding rhythms, seismic heaviness, and profound humanity at its core—all sharpened for maximum effect. Their four-song, 76-minute album is a live performance tour de force unique in its dexterity, creativity, and clarity of purpose.
But if jaw-dropping musicianship is a given by this point in Sumac’s career, what makes The Healer exceptional is its command of spatial presence and emotional weight. “World of Light” begins its unhinged half hour as an eldritch ooze of drone, low-end rumble, and Turner’s primal rasp. The cracked caterwaul he releases when crying out “Shiiine!” sounds more animalistic than any guttural growl could. About 11 minutes in, the music starts climbing out of the turbulent soup with slow, deliberate steps. It can feel like some kind of cosmic rebirth or spiritual awakening. Yacyshyn and Cook’s brutal rhythm section sometimes drops out completely, leaving Turner’s guitar and Faith Coloccia’s tape noise to cut haunting shapes from the void. Diving head-first into negative space, Sumac builds tension while revealing what hides beneath each onslaught.
Often what The Healer reveals is hidden in plain sight. The three main instruments are recorded as if under a microscope, more intensely rendering the physicality of their moment-to-moment vibrations. Bass strings rattle against the fretboard like a chained animal; droning feedback crackles like woodfire; the toggle of guitar switches snap like dried leaves; cymbals burst and glimmer like fractals. The hyper-reality of these peripheral sounds brings a raw psychedelia to the music, which is a rich through line across The Healer. “Yellow Dawn,” full of warbling organ notes and low-slung tom patter, begins with the band’s most explicitly psychedelic arrangement. It carries through the merciless pummeling and origami time signatures to reemerge as an untethered guitar solo that’s as much “Dopesmoker” as it is “Black Hole Sun.” Such recognizable and warmly loved sounds round out the album’s more intricate stretches in a way that galvanizes both.
In a year that has seen Knocked Loose going viral on Spotify and Deftones rank among the most popular bands listened to during sex, Sumac has released their least crossover-friendly record yet. The Healer stands in stark contrast to dopamine-drenched metal blasts the length of TikTok videos, like a meditative yet grotesque Jodorowsky film in all of its surreal excess. Epic album closer “The Stone’s Turn” is a mystifying journey, full of starts and stops, whirlwind blast beats, diffuse psych, and electrified riffs that just fucking go. If Love in Shadow searched ever more deeply for metal’s untapped possibilities and May You Be Held confidently wrestled with its roiling unknown, then The Healer swallows its universe whole and reforms it anew. It’s an album that uses the rejection of metal’s well-trodden forms not as an endpoint but as a catalyst for bringing something else into being.
Let’s start with the Edgar mullet: the haircut that has kids all across Mexico walking into barbershops and demanding the “Peso Pluma.” This is just one of the idiosyncrasies that has made Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija the man of the moment in mainstream Spanish-language music. There is the expensive jewelry and designer clothing—Richard Mille watches, Christian Dior shoes, Maison Margiela jackets—that he regularly namechecks in his songs. There is his lanky physique. And then there is his voice: a scratchy, sometimes grating croak or rasp, depending on his mood. That singular voice sings about lots of things: popping bottles of Dom, carrying bricks of coke, assassinating enemies, hooking up with Russian models. You know, an average Tuesday.
Over the last year, the 25-year-old Mexican singer of Lebanese descent has racked up a list of chart and streaming records as long as a CVS receipt, ushering música mexicana to unprecedented commercial heights. ÉXODO, his fourth studio album, is a victory lap of sorts; the LP celebrates how far the movement has come, with Pluma taking homies, cousins, and fellow trailblazers like Natanael Cano, Junior H, Tito Double P, and Eslabon Armado along for the ride. But the album is also a bona fide attempt to cement Peso Pluma’s versatility—and the longevity it promises—in the industry. ÉXODO confirms he’s one of the most charismatic corrido performers of our time, but as for his ability to shapeshift across genres and flows, Peso Pluma the pop star still has some convincing to do.
The crackle of Peso’s voice is the molten core of ÉXODO. Its peculiarity is a blessing, but in some moments, it can also be a curse. His coarse growl is especially effective on the bare-knuckle norteño “La People II,” which seems to be written from the perspective of Joel Enrique “El 19” Sandoval Romero, a sicario and security chief for the Sinaloa cartel who was arrested by the Mexican government in 2014. Pluma and his guests snarl viciously as they recount tales of battling police officers, the national guard, and the military to protect their bosses (ostensibly Ovidio Guzmán López, a high-ranking leader of the Sinaloa cartel and the son of El Chapo) from capture. Peso assumes the voice of El 19, asking his associates to take care of his “land, his family, and his parents,” presumably while he’s locked up.
The debate about artists’ roles in glamorizing narco culture didn’t start with—and won’t end with—Peso Pluma. Too often, narcocorrido stars have become ideological scapegoats for the federal government’s failure to curb violence; other times, artists have denied they have any sociocultural impact at all. The discourse is fraught, but one thing is certain: Pluma excels when he performs the mythos of narco culture, no holds barred. It places him firmly within the genealogy of his forebears, like his late idols Chalino Sánchez and Ariel Camacho, who showed a similar talent for passionate storytelling, even as they romanticized narratives of murder and revenge. La Doble P reimagines that tradition on “Put Em in the Fridge,” a cold corrido-trap beat built on a blaring horn loop. He tries on a squeaky but bellicose cadence for size, bragging with Cardi B about moving kilos and calling on shooters to put their enemies on ice. Cardi’s gift for rapping athletically in both Dominican Spanish and English makes her a natural collaborator here; the pair goes bar for bar in a thrilling, peacocking display. It’s also a sublime example of Pluma’s talent for redefining his musical heritage for the present day.
Sometimes, Peso’s vocal left turns are electrifying; other times, he struggles to hit the mark. On the eminently catchy “Bruce Wayne,” he likens himself to the superhero billionaire with gravelly self-assurance, only to switch into biting, Pusha T-style raps two minutes in. On “Me Activo,” he shifts his voice into a serenade-like tone reminiscent of his performance on Kali Uchis’ “Igual Que un Ángel.” But elsewhere, the elasticity of Peso’s voice is less convincing. Despite a superb Ric Flair sample, the ballad “Ice” suffers from the more abrasive, nasally textures of Peso’s voice when he strains to reach a higher register.
It’s particularly tough to hear La Doble P struggle in his ventures outside of corridos tumbados. That’s not to say he isn’t capable of adapting successfully. Take the single “Bellakeo,” a sexy reggaeton entanglement with a drilling dembow riddim that contains spiritual echoes of Plan B. But ÉXODO is littered with unfortunate miscalculations. “Gimme a Second,” with Rich the Kid, feels like a throwaway B-side from the already middling Future and Metro Boomin album; Pluma’s appearance starts off strong with a low, sinister bridge, but then he forcefully tries to squeeze his squeaky voice into one of Atlanta’s distinctive flows. “Pa No Pensar,” an emo trap ballad with corrido undertones, boasts a grippingly morose vocal performance, but it’s marred by cookie-cutter lines about overindulging in alcohol and weed to escape reality (I’ll stay for Quavo saying “This good mota,” though). And, “Peso Completo,” with the reggaeton legend Arcángel, falls into the trap of pure mimesis. Though the artists share a trademark rasp, one of Arcángel’s creative tics is artful over-enunciation; Pluma straight up apes that technique here, resulting in a poorly executed facsimile.
The idea of flaunting his versatility is admirable. But that message might have been more efficiently conveyed if ÉXODO didn’t frequently feel like a slog. The first eight tracks are nearly indistinguishable, coalescing into a lyrical and melodic blur of tololoche strums, money, and women. Even if the album format has been downgraded in the streaming era, ÉXODO works neither as a coherent LP nor as a no-skips playlist. Like many other major pop albums of the 2020s, it would have benefited from a careful edit and a more varied track order.
But when Peso Pluma decides to shine, he’s radiant. “Vino Tinto,” with Natanael Cano and Gabito Ballesteros, is a graduate-level seminar in the corrido tumbado form. All three singers push their voices to the limit: They bellow, they growl, and they harmonize, transmitting the yearning and suffering that undergirds the best corridos—even if they are talking about drinking red wine and waiting for the molly to hit, not your local folk hero’s war battles. When Peso belts out “Ando relax,” he elongates and then punctuates the “a,” as if his vibeyness is some supernatural force rising from within. It’s the corrido prince at his most magnetic, capturing all the style’s thorny contradictions in a single breath.
