Release Date: August 28th 2026. Record Label: Self Released. Formats: CD/Vinyl
With Love - Tracklist
1.Psychic Surgery
2.The Guts Of Albion
3.Under The Rainbow
4.In The Oils
5.Snagged On Frowns
6.Cloth Control
Members
James Allsopp – tenor saxophone
Kaz Buckland – drums, electronics
Matt Cargill – electronics, voice, percussion
Ed Dudley – electronics, voice
Will Glaser – drums, electronics
Review
Sly & The Family Drone return with their latest offering With Love and it’s equally weird and brilliantly inventive as their previous records. The band have always been quite hard to fully describe or categorize which is down to the endless amount of sounds they create within their music. The band call themselves a “Neo Jazz Wrecking Crew” and that’s a great way to describe them but that only tells half of the story.
Jazz plays a bit part of Sly & The Family Drone’s musical identity but they play movements of Psych, Folk, Doom, Drone, Sludge, Prog and massive freak-ish beats. The sound is wonderfully tribal and quite cosmic which feels like what a Psych/Jazz album would sound like if it was being conducted by Alejandro Jodorowsky. The record has been quite difficult for me to review as I haven’t listened to the band in a long time and how they add so many different musical instruments into the mix makes it even harder.
However, I’m not complaining as With Love is a hugely enjoyable of fucked up moments which kept me on the edge of my seat. It’s best to describe it as a singular album that’s been broken down into individual segments with each song allowing Sly & The Family Drone to experiment with different musical themes, sounds and eerie emotional templates. Any band that plays their own warped and noise rock version of the classic track Over The Rainbow deserves to be heard.
Most readers may know I’m not the biggest fan of Saxophone based music but it’s gloriously heavy and freakishly powerful throughout this album. The opening tracks of Psychic Surgery and The Guts Of Albion are down beat, gloomy and distorted with Sly & The Family Drone adding glitchy sound effects along the way. The Post-Rock, Drone and Psychedelic soundscapes have a dark hallucinogenic effect which allows the Industrial Rock/Metal and Neo-Jazz surroundings to fully take over.
With Love can be quite demented with the slow paced music forging new creative openings for the band to overlap with an abstract Space Rock theme on tracks such as The Guts Of Albion, Over The Rainbow, In The Oils and Snagged Out Frowns. There’s some massive KrautRock and Japanese Psychedelic Freakout influences with the band applying that epic Jazzy attitude which becomes even more daring and brilliantly surreal which feels like you’re coming down from the most massive WEEDIAN trip possible.
Even with the intense experimentation, Sly & The Family Drone still offer a grounded approach to their music which does become quite schizophrenic along the way. These guys have been around for the best part of two decades now and know a thing or two about experimenting with finely tuned SONIC based passages which even have a heavier presence than you initially expect.
The vocals drift into existence only when they’re really needed but it’s still sometimes confusing to listen to at first so expect to have multiple listens to fully understand the story of With Love. I’ve listened to the album about four or five times now and I'm even finding new sounds to fully explore with every listen.
With Love is a great album with first rate production values allowing Sly & The Family Drone showing why they’re one of the finest Progressive bands we have in the UK scene. This won’t be for everyone and is perhaps suited for their established fan base. However, I would recommend you give this record a chance as With Love will surprise the hell out of you.
Words by Steve Howe
Links
Official | Facebook | BandCamp | Instagram
