Drug Honkey - Cloak Of Skies album review

Warped brilliance from sludge’s mad scientists

Cover art for Drug Honkey - Cloak Of Skies album

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

In these jaded times it’s rare to discover an album that makes you spit your coffee across the room while shrieking “What the fuck am I listening to?!” Cloak Of Skies is exactly that kind of record. Ostensibly a sludge metal band, Drug Honkey have conceived and constructed a vivid and terrifying sonic world here, wherein festering sub-bass frequencies and tortured synths underpin a sustained onslaught of snail’s pace hypno-doom. At times it’s like listening to Cop-era Swans reimagined by the Butthole Surfers at their lysergic peak, at others it’s like some unholy mash-up of Hellhammer and Scorn’s Vae Solis. Either way, the likes of syrupy space rock dirge Sickening Wasteoid and the synapse-wrenching evil psych of Outlet Of Hatred are almost overwhelming in their power and grim charisma. The irresistible pull of the abyss is expressed through slow-motion nightmares, heaviness used as a weapon of nefarious enlightenment. Concluding with a Justin Broadrick remix of album opener Pool Of Failure, this is a staggering, unmissable triumph for bong-battered disorientation and psychedelic heft.

Dom Lawson
Writer

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s.