Bands that peg their name to their sound risk painting themselves into a corner, but on their earliest DIY recordings, Vancouver duo New Age Doom embraced truth in advertising. If not quite as gimmicky as their moniker might suggest—what if Laraaji made a Sunn0))) record, lol—releases like 2019’s self-titled anthology and 2020’s Himalayan Dream Techno staked out the middle ground between the cathedral and the commune, filtering heavy metal’s black-mass grandeur and percussive thunder through the free-flowing serenity and found-sound ingenuity of ’70s private-press ambient recordings. But since then, the New Age Doom name has come to represent less a cheeky genre mash-up than a guiding philosophy, a means to manifest the balance of natural beauty and apocalyptic chaos that governs life on Earth. Sure, New Age Doom are the sort of act who will set up shop on the street to startle unsuspecting passersby, but they also just might be the only noise band with their own brand of plant-based cashew dip.
Though centered on the core duo of guitarist Greg Valou and drummer Eric J. Breitenbach, New Age Doom have broadened their horizons on every album, often with help from collaborators. The most notable of these was 2021’s Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Guide to the Universe, where New Age Doom and a team of guest players backed up the dub legend on the final album he recorded in his lifetime. Their new release enlists many of the same musicians—including Blackstar bassist Tim Lefebvre and trumpet player Daniel Rosenboom—to support another vocalist, but the lead-role casting and musical approach couldn’t be more different. Where Guide to the Universe saw New Age Doom play a more subservient role to Perry, complementing their hero’s stream-of-conscious poetry with suitably zoned-out soundscapes, There Is No End has them constructing more concrete arrangements around the Norwegian dream-pop artist Tuva Hellum Marschhäuser, aka Tuvaband, whose luminous voice functions as the beacon that guides them through the stormiest passages.
There Is No End builds a bridge between the two projects’ respective worlds. Its opening track, “In the Beginning,” expands upon an idea introduced on Tuvaband’s “By the Time You Hear This,” the centerpiece of her 2023 album New Orders, where Marschhäuser asks, “Is this the end of the start of the end of the start of the end/Or is it the start of the end of the start of the end of the start?” In their original context, those words seemed to address the uncertain status of a relationship, but on “In the Beginning,” she weaves a similarly cyclical sentiment into something more like a Zen koan: “In the beginning, I’m just beginning,” she states matter-of-factly, “and in the end there is no end.” New Age Doom put that doctrine into action with a track that slowly whips itself into a towering inferno of tambura melodies, transcendental trumpet flourishes, and surging percussive grooves, before everything comes crashing down at the six-minute mark. But what initially sounds like a dramatic, drum-set-toppling finale is actually a gateway to the song’s extended coda, where the expanded ensemble smashes and thrashes with furious intensity for five more minutes until the clamor gives way to clarity.
The greater melodic definition and more purposeful song structures of There Is No End aren’t a complete surprise. For all the group’s avant-drone acumen, New Age Doom’s roots are in power pop: Breitenbach is also a member of Canadian alt-rock hitmakers Limblifter, a band that’s shared membership with the New Pornographers and whose lead singer, Ryan Dahle, serves as the mixing and mastering engineer here. The New Age Doom crew also includes Cola Wars, better known as Sloan’s longtime keyboardist, Gregory MacDonald. There Is No End is hardly a wellspring of jangly guitars and sun-kissed harmonies, but it does belong to a venerable lineage of adventurous, worldly rock music that connects the mid-’70s Middle Eastern fascinations of Led Zeppelin, the klezmer-powered crescendos of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the recent microtonal explorations of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, making this the sort of experimental album that could still be embraced by people who think Bandcamp is a place you go to learn the cello in the summer.
But on a record that features such eclectic noisemakers as gongs, saz, and marxophone, Marschhäuser’s voice remains the most captivating and commanding instrument, whether it’s the focal point of a song or a subliminal texture within it. “Fearless Talisman” is essentially seven minutes of Breitenbach bashing out a ricocheting backbeat while the brass section unloads the psych-jazz firepower, but the emergence of Marschhäuser’s wordless choral incantations reframe this manic jam as a mournful elegy for a world gone mad. And with There Is No End’s closing title track, she’s given the space to showcase the mercurial qualities of her voice. Like the album’s opener, it riffs on a circular end-is-the-beginning logic, but where the joyful noise of “In the Beginning” signified rebirth, “There Is the End” is imbued with regret. For its first four minutes, the song resembles the sort of tranquil, sax-sweetened indie-pop ballad that wouldn’t sound out of place on Tuvaband’s own records. But after shifting into a Portishead-like dub-noir groove, her words suddenly seem less vulnerable than vindictive, transforming the most heartfelt track on the record into its most haunting. When they released their anarchic first recordings four years ago, there was little to suggest Valou and Breitenbach would ever steer the project toward music as sophisticated, dramatic, and emotionally layered as this. But with There Is No End, they’ve successfully updated their doom for a new age.
