#haurun

Haurun - Wilting Within (Small Stone Records, Kozmik Artifactz, 2023)

I’m convinced that the members of Oakland 5-piece Haurun have sprouted roots. The band has tapped down into the doom, drone, and psych genres to grow a sound that’s all their own. The band’s new album, Wilting Within, is a bouquet of night blooming tracks—each gloomier and more narcotic than the last. Drop the needle with me as we tiptoe into Haurun’s wicked garden. 

The album opens on Abyss. The track slowly manifests from thin air. The creeping tune is spectral, otherworldly. Floating vocals by Lyra Cruz reach across the veil to caress your gray matter. It’s a grim phantasm of a song— the perfect portent of what’s to come. 

Lost & Found is a dose of melancholy distilled down to its purest form, and laced with fuzz. A slow guitar riff rings out with sustain for days. Yet for all of its shoegazing, the composition is surprisingly nimble. This song is a somber stranger murmuring sweet and terrible nothings in your ear.

Tension slithers through the desert with a forked tongue and an audacious attitude. Cruz’s voice twists and dives through the nocturnal landscape. The intensity expands steadily, as the track evolves into a psychedelic trip by firelight. Pay attention to the fierce fucking drum work on this hypnotic offering.

Flying Low keeps the altered state rolling with spaced out guitars, mesmerizing vocals, and a riff that bends and burrows its way through your skull. Get liquified, and let all the colors melt together with this darkly beautiful track. 

Lunar opens on a groovy elastic riff. Anesthetic vocals threaten to waft away, untethered. An instrumental break adds heft to an otherwise buoyant track. 

Clocking in at over 11 minutes, Soil makes for an eloquent closing statement. Drone doom fans are in for a treat here. The plodding pace and weighty hum make this piece absolutely devastating from the get-go. Cruz explores the lower register of her voice. The song takes unexpected twists and turns—gathering energy into a snappy beat and rocking out in psychedelic ecstasy, before slamming on the brakes and wading through the muck in a funerary slog.