Sugar Horse: Back In The Saddle

In the modern age it is quite easy to feel overwhelmed with the sheer volume of different musical acts in front of you. The internet has made it easier than ever for people to find new music to listen to which is fantastic, but the flip side of this is that it has become more difficult than ever for bands to stand out from amongst the crowd and to get noticed. Enter SUGAR HORSE, a band that are as unique as you could hope to find without having some sort of weird gimmick to speak of.

However, where the intrigue with this group are founded is in their dry sense of humour and cutting wit, coupled with their penchant for writing obscure metal music that spans all sorts of genres such as shoegaze, post-metal, doom and stoner to name just a few.

The band have a self-deprecating sense of humour when it comes to their music, which is refreshing to say the least as plenty of artists nowadays seem to have taken up permanent residence inside their own rear-ends. For example, the band refer to themselves quite openly as ‘A decidedly average band’. In fact, when questioned on the doomier influences of the band’s sound frontman Ashley Tubb responds with “I think we’re just not that good as musicians, it’s out of necessity more than anything,” and that is pretty much the ethos of the band; make fun of yourselves and don’t take everything seriously and the rest of the world will get on board. After all, if you’re truly good at something then you shouldn’t have to tell people yourself.

When it comes to their latest offering The Live Long After, the story of the composition is much like many others around the world over the past couple years. “We had most of the album written towards the end of 2019,” explains Tubb. “Then I had a majority of the rest of the songs in rough versions saved on my phone, which was incredibly frustrating because we wanted to get in the studio and thrash them out.” This makes the finished article even more interesting to delve into. As many of musicians would have gone back and over the same songs repeatedly with the intent to tweak and polish the existing songs, often ruining the overall product whereas SUGAR HORSE have patiently sat on their work and have still managed to bring the same raw, DIY sound to the album that makes them so intriguing.

When it comes to the subject of the band’s genre hopping sound it comes down to one very simple and completely understandable reason, explained perfectly by Tubbs. “I think we just get bored to be honest. If we had to be heavy all the time, I feel like I would get bored after two songs of the writing process for a new album and would just repeat the same riff over and over.” It is that dry sense of humour and brutal honesty that makes the man himself so endearing and so easy to empathise with, there are so many musicians that use flowery language and overblown clichés to explain what they do creatively but with SUGAR HORSE you know everything is coming from an honest and relatable place.

Without giving too much away Tubb would then reveal that the band have eighteen or nineteen songs written and ready to record. However, he would not divulge what style they are in or when they would get to see the light of day for obvious reasons. So, the question from here is where does the band go sonically next? We know that they can write a heavy, punchy riff or ten and with their gaze sensibilities it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for the band to dive further down that rabbit hole or even take a complete left turn and embrace Tubbs’ passionate love and admiration for the gothic post-rock luminaries THE CURE (a conversation was had at length about their back catalogue and the creative genius of Robert Smith and his cohorts).

Whichever way they go it will be something that people will need to pay attention to as SUGAR HORSE are not a band that like to stay still and are constantly adding new bells and whistles to their already textured and musically adventurous sound.

The Live Long After is out now via Small Pond Records.

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