Louder AAA
In 2018, Earth Tongue booked their first European tour. For a fledgling doom rock duo from New Zealand, this was a monumental endeavour. They hired an estate car and drove around for a couple of months, making mistakes, spending money and having fun. At one point in a badly routed schedule, they performed in a restaurant in Italy as diners wolfed down plates of pasta.
“We were quite anxious about it,” says singer/guitarist Gussie Larkin. “But after the show, we talked to people, and they were like: ‘No, it’s very normal. We have rock bands playing restaurants all the time!’”
Earth Tongue were formed a couple of years earlier by Larkin and drummer Ezra Simons, and the tour allowed the pair to build up contacts that are still serving them today, a time during which they have moved from ad-hoc restaurant bookings to the heights of Desert Fest, where they played in 2024, completing a trio of shows in London, Berlin and Oslo alongside acts including Masters Of Reality and Brant Bjork.
“On a line-up like that, where there’s a lot of straight-up stoner rock and metal, we are always a surprise to people,” says Larkin. “And that Berlin show really exemplified how we can turn people who have never heard us before into fans.”
They have also made three albums, each based on a different movie genre: 2019’s Floating Being (sci-fi), 2024’s Great Haunting (horror) and this year’s Dungeon Vision (fantasy). That latest was produced in Los Angeles by legendary garage rock revivalist Ty Segall, whom the band first supported in NZ in 2023 when he played with his Freedom band.
“It turns out they’re all really big New Zealand music nerds,” says Simons. “So there was a lot of common ground to talk about.”
Earth Tongue were subsequently invited to support Segall in Europe, on a tour that included London’s iconic Roundhouse. Work on the album followed.
“His ethos is just you have to turn up and give a really good performance,” says Simons. “There’s nothing to hide behind.”
The end result, Dungeon Vision, is a fuzz-drenched blend of demonic riffing and 60s-influenced melody, with Larkin’s robotic, almost chanted vocals augmented by cleverly realised harmonies and Simons’s rattling drums.
Earth Tongue are on a roll. A February NZ tour saw fans wearing crowns, and an eight-piece choir joined them on stage during a show in Auckland. The pair now have a Northern Hemisphere base in Berlin, and a US tour has just been completed. But, with typical Kiwi reserve, they aren’t getting carried away. “We’re just happy to be able to do it and to pay rent,” says Larkin.
Dungeon Vision is out now via In The Red.
