ROCKET RECORDINGS 17th October 2025
A friend tells me that this fifth release on Rocket Recordings is the closest Smote have come to the live sound, which is crushingly heavy, bathed in a dark sea of red light. The opening piece, ‘The Cottar’ combines repetitive pipe tunes, lead-filled chords and a strong melodic guitar melody behind the almost-opaque curtain of sound. Amplifiers buzz with distortion and floors shake with jack-hammer thuds. Each piece goes on as long as it needs and the droney-groove is mythic in intensity and temporal permanence.
Daniel Foggin’s mission to explore new levels of heaviness continues. Smote is his project but he has a band for touring and here he brings in Sally Manson from the live band for vocals and Ian Lynch from Lankum on Uillean pipes. Otherwise, the whole thing is his and it’s remarkable that he has achieved such an organic sound from overdubs and playbacks. If you like the awesomely slow collapsing miasma of Earth or the never-ending drone of Sunn O))), this will make your ear drums smile.
Daniel Foggin has spent the majority of his adult life working as a landscape gardener, “more often covered in mud than not. I think the music is a direct reflection of this feeling that I haven’t quite managed to define yet, it is dirty and hard but there is an overwhelming comfort to it.” He uses the forces around him, using guitars only in part – the heaviest sounds are from electronics.
There is something ritualistic here and the sung part of ‘The Linton Wyrm’ brings thoughts of the incantations of Wardruna, while drawing on the legend of a serpent that menaced Jedburgh. ‘Snodgerss’ hits a psychedelic folk fury that conjures up images of a crazed Borders bacchanal that makes The Wicker Man look like a teddy bears’ picnic. ‘Chamber’ has a glorious, distant, organ melody towards the end, just one of the aspects that pop up amid the drone and crunches, making the music unchanging and yet ever-flowing.
The album combines folky aspects, incantation, psychedelia, drone, centre-of-the-earth heaviness in one epically focused package.
Ross McGibbon