18 August 2025

THE MYRRORS – Land Back (2025, LP/CD/Cassette, Radio Khiyaban-EU / Cardinal Fuzz-UK / A.U.M.-North America)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Radio Khiyaban / Cardinal Fuzz / A.U.M.

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Black Vinyl, 400 copies

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Olive Green & Transparent Colour-In-Colour, 150 copies

Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition, Handmade sleeve (by Same Giles)

Format: Cassette, Album, Limited Edition

Release Date: 9 Aug 2025

From the sun-scorched expanse of the Arizona desert – where dust swirls like ancestral memory and sound carries like wind across canyon walls – The Myrrors have once again emerged from the haze with a transmission that feels as ancient as it is urgent. “Land Back”, their long-delayed follow-up to 2018’s “Borderlands”, isn’t just an album – it’s a psychic excavation, an improvised manifesto recorded on occupied Tohono O’odham land in a single fevered week back in 2021…

After years of silence and seismic global unrest, founding members N.R. Safi and Grant Beyschau, alongside Miguel Urbina, reconvene not to pick up where they left off, but to dig deeper; into the drone, into the trance, into the cracked soil of memory and resistance. What they’ve unearthed isn’t comfort, but confrontation: a swirling ritual of psychedelic minimalism and spiritual reclamation that feels less like a “comeback” and more like a reckoning.

“Land Back” consists of just 5 songs, 4 on the first side of the LP album and 1 sidetrack on the flip side. The album doesn’t ease you in – it breaks through. A compact invocation that crackles with tension, “Breakthrough” (1:42) opens the record not with a whisper but with the clang of bells, the ancient breath of the Shruti box, and fractured feedback that pierces like desert wind. Grant Beyschau’s rhythmic pulse dances with Safi’s dissonant guitar and ghost-flute incantations, setting the tone: raw, ceremonial, and wholly unrepentant. It’s less a song than an opening ritual, tearing a portal open… The album’s title track is where ideology and sonics truly lock arms. “Land Back” (5:13) doesn’t just declare its politics – it enacts them through communal sound. Safi’s voice – defiant yet mournful – rides a current of spiraling violin and rhythmic chants, while Beyschau’s saxophone screams in protest, filtered through a haze of tape delay. It’s a reclamation hymn disguised as psychedelic rock, both grounded in earth and unbound by borders… As “Snake Dancers In The Assembly Of Death” (4:05) starts, the record slides into its most hypnotic mode yet. Like the title suggests, it slithers. The Buzuq and Tula flute twist around each other in a slow spiral, haunted by the shimmer of goat bells and bowed strings. Urbina’s viola weaves in like a shadow moving across stone. The rhythm – part procession, part possession – slinks and shifts under the weight of something ancient… The last track of the A side is named after two cities tied to the history of anti-colonial solidarity, “Bakú a Bandung” (8:25) is a trance in the form of a protest. For nearly nine minutes, The Myrrors stretch sound like fabric pulled tight, layering bulbul tarang, saxophone, clarinet, zither, and clay drum into an ever-expanding web. It’s chaotic but controlled, raw yet composed, a hallucinatory march for the dispossessed. One could easily imagine this being played at the edge of a demonstration, or in its aftermath… Side B is occupied by “The Wretched Of The Earth” (15:02), the album’s final piece isn’t just a track; it’s a statement. Clocking in at fifteen minutes, it opens with a drone and slow loops that feel like a funeral dirge for empire. But slowly, organically, it blooms into a monumental piece of psychedelic resistance. Echoes of Terry Riley, early Eno, even spiritual jazz à la Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane thread through the layers of feedback, violin, and clarinet. Beyschau’s sax, again, stands as a one-man army. When the piece dips into silence and then re-emerges with renewed strength, it’s not a return, it’s rebirth. Every second feels earned. It’s the sound of the world ending and beginning at once… It’s the sound of healing, through noise… Is it a farewell to the old world and a door to the new?

In conclusion, after years of silence, “Land Back” arrives not as a passive document of its time, but as an active participant in it. It listens to the land and speaks through it. It mourns, resists, and dreams all at once. Every instrument is a voice, every drone a memory, every crescendo a demand. By grounding their music in both improvisation and deep political awareness, The Myrrors remind us that psychedelia doesn’t have to mean escapism. It can be insurgent. It can be ancestral. It can be a weapon! This is music as earth, as fire, as refusal. This is Land Back! TimeLord Michalis