Sugar Horse return with Not A Sound In Heaven, a record tracked live in a single room with no clicks or tracks, rarely more than a couple of takes per song. What emerges is something immediate and physical, a document that feels less constructed than captured mid-surge.

It opens with “Fire Graphics”, a blunt-force introduction: drums crash in with a kind of processional insistence, while guitars pile up in dense, disorienting layers. When the vocals cut through, the identity is unmistakable, and Chris’s bass work feels especially charged – restless, tightly coiled, and brimming with barely suppressed anger.

Lyrically, the track draws from Killing Hope by William Blum, tracing the human cost of American foreign policy across the 20th century. There’s even an unexpected rhythmic turn as the band showcase something almost danceable with big disco beats slipping into the track without any warning, suggesting a band willing to disrupt its own weight.

Across the record, Sugar Horse lean into themes of fractured truths and inherited narratives, interrogating the systems that shape what we accept as reality. “Ex-Human Shield” pushes further into the uncomfortable: abrasive and claustrophobic, with Tubb’s voice veering between guttural outbursts and ghostly choral passages. It’s a collision of extremes both harsh and strangely compelling as industrial textures begin to seep into the band’s palette.

As with their earlier work, the decision to record live leaves everything slightly unstable. Tubb has described it as keeping the songs “on the edge of falling apart”, and that tension becomes a defining feature rather than a flaw.

“History’s Biggest T-Shirt” arrives with a certain gothic swagger, before dissolving into something more weightless and blurred at the edges. Its lyrics weave in fragments of a speech by Salvador Allende, delivered during the 1973 coup that led to his death and the ascent of Augusto Pinochet.

Meanwhile, “Company Town” locks into a rigid, mechanical pulse, drawing on The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Its focus is pointed: the illusion of choice under capitalism, and the quiet sense of entrapment within systems that resist meaningful change. While closing track You Can’t Say Dallas Doesn’t Love you reaffirms the mission to do whatever the fuck they want as the slow building track pushes its way further and further into your being before eventually settling into something more peaceful and calming.

Not A Sound In Heaven is a forceful statement from a band that sound fully self-possessed and pushing their music, ideas and identity in whatever direction they choose, with little interest in compromise.

You can catch Sugar Horse Live in Nottingham on the 17th April for us at The Old Bus Depot – TICKETS HERE