The new EarthBall album landed here last week, we’ve been looking forward to more from EarthBall, they are one of the more essential forward looking bands out there right now, one of the very few I’d say were actually vital. Had the recordings sitting here for a week waiting for the right moment, you can’t just throw these things one, you’ve got to wait for the right moment, you’ve got to think about it, let it stand, like that wait for a good pint of Guinness served by a pub who know what they’re doing and take a pride in it to settle.
EarthBall are the only band we have ever seen or heard who can be compared to those intense first couple of months of Huge Baby. Go look up previous EarthBall ravings on these Organ pages, go find that live footage from Oto or that time at the bandstand, you’ll find it all on these fractured pages, and then try to workout how they’ve dialled it up even more this time! This is why we still do this Organ thing that we started way too many years ago, almost thirty nine now, we’ve seen and heard a lot of bands!
So Outside Over There had to wait until the moment was right and the right moment was after a day of painting and a thousand other things that turned it down, or was it up? Sunday evening, just as the sun was going down, there were other places I could have been but this was the moment to clear the decks, put a new piece piece of canvas on the easel and fie up the new EarthBall album… What follows was written last Sunday evening without much thinking about it. And now here I am on Tuesday, opening the locket again, or at lease having a look awt what I banged out on the keyboard, playing it again in the studio, in the late Tuesday morning late Summer early Autumn sun, and yes, I was right… Here’s what was written last Sunday evening…
EarthBall – Outside Over There (Upset The Rhythm) – Now once we’re passed that slight distraction of the opening and the bluff of that pear cider (what was that all about?) EarthBall are straight in and straight away sounding bigger (and indeed more menacing) than ever, this is huge (baby). This is Huge Baby! If that makes sense (and you have that ten inch slab of vinyl on the orange wrap around cover with gold block printing on it) then you just know what is meant and you know how big that statement is coming from here. If it doesn’t mean a thing then we finally a band as good as (a band you probably never heard of called) Huge Baby were in those early days and those devastating three or so months before the original line up inevitably fell apart, listen to that second piece Helsinki and tell me that thing isn’t there. Why am I talking about Huge Baby in an Earthball review? Well that’s how good these Canadian noise makers are! Earthball have all that intensity and more, this is very (very) much what is needed around here today (of all days).
So the new EarthBall album landed here a couple of days ago, I’ve been waiting for the right moment, I expected good, I expected far more than good, of course I did, they have been championed very loudly around here rather lot in recent years. I expected brilliant, this is already more than could reasonably be expected and we are only halfway through the third track here! This is the very first listen and I already know this is the album of the year and what really grabs is that it isn’t just more of the same. I mean it is, it is very much more of the same, it is that same intense almost overwhelming noise but they’re not just painting the same painting again. It is very much EarthBall, if you know the band and their sound then you’d know it was them straight away. No mistaking it, this is very much Earthball’s sound, but but but, crucially with this new record, they haven’t just made more of the same. Truth is they very easily could have done just that and left us more than happy. What have they done? is it just more of everything? Everything from last time just dialled up even more? There’s a menace here this time that feels way more to the front than it was last time, this really will untune the sky, I really really (really) needed to hear this album today, they have dialled it up, it is more when you didn’t really think there could be more, but things are wider this time, the little side streets they go down are different, the mood swings you maybe didn’t expect to swing so much, the words you need to try and make sense of..
And right here, right now, in the never to be repeated moment, in the silence after the very first play, and no, I can’t just dive back in and hit the play it again Sam button, I need that silence, I need just the wind and the storm at the open door and nothing else. I need to catch my breath, I love this band! I’ve only ever seen them a couple of times, once when they ripped Cafe Oto apart and once when they played with just as much intensity during an impromptu performance they did without warning or permission in an East London bandstand, a never to be forgotten afternoon over in Arnold Circus (the neighbours loved it! Amazingly the police never did show up!). Hang on, I’ve got my breath back, I’ve loaded up my brush, I’m going back in again, round two…
Outside Over There is the new album from Canada’s EarthBall, here’s a bit from the press release…
“Heavyweight psychedelic improvisers EarthBall are back with their third and most monstrous record to date: Outside Over There, released on Upset The Rhythm (Nov 7th). Born from the haunted basements of Nanaimo, Canada, the quintet thrives on spontaneity, shaping improvisation into jagged hallucinations and ecstatic eruptions. Recorded live-off-the-floor in 2024 in Jeremy, Izzy, and Kellen’s studio, and mixed by drummer John Brennan, Outside Over There is an album that feels both summoned and inevitable. Each track lands with uncanny purpose, as if uncovered rather than written. Opening track, 100%, features a cameo from comedian/cultural icon Stewart Lee, who lent his blessing for the band to use a fragment of his stand-up. The album was mastered by John Dieterich (Deerhoof), with liner text contributed by longtime comrade John Olson (Wolf Eyes). Olson describes the album in his unmistakable style…” and we’ll let Mr Olson do it rather than force you to read more of my nonsense…
“This eight-track odyssey unfolds like a dreamscape, where whispered incantations brush against the shadowy fringes of the cosmos, and wild, Cézanne-inspired rock anthems erupt like geysers of color in the midst of a western warm and wet rain storm… culminating in the sprawling eleven-minute masterpiece, ‘And The Music Shall Untune The Sky,’ aptly dubbed the Earth Crusher. A creation so utterly deconstructed and intertwined with the pulse of nature itself that if AI was called upon to conceive ‘Outside Over There’ anew, it would just spit back, “F.U. in Tree Font”. An enchanting invitation for even the flat-earthers to join the circle, if only just a little.”
I don’t know if I’d say “Cézanne-inspired rock anthems erupt like geysers of color”, it feels darker and more intense than that, and no, certainly not rock anthems! far more intense and I do know there’s a U in colour. But the writer is right, John Olson is right, It does sound like a ritual, if it is improv, then it always seems (just about) under control, on the edge of running away and taking everything with it, on the edge but never out of control. If I was to compare them to a painter then who? Sean Scully when he’s really locked in to painting his stripes and has no idea what’s around him? They’re far heavier than Jackson Pollock, not calm enough to be Rothko but there is some of that sitting in the Rothko room in the Tate about them. The title track Outside Over There sounds perfect in this storm that’s raging outside the Organ bunker in East London right now – the studio door is wide open, the big tree outside is joining in with all those wind chimes (on the record) joining in with the intense menace of it all, this is a beautiful moment – “you better believe it” she sings. EarthBall are just so beautifully intense (no apologies for using that word again and again, they are intense), they’re as heavy as any band you’ve heard, but, as it has been said on these pages before, not in the obvious way of heavy metal, they’re far heavier than mere heavy metal.
Right now with Seeing Doors Unlock and the track before it, Outside Over There, they’re being something of a mindfuck, or she is, a beautiful mindfuck, crude of me, but that is really how I need to put it. Isabel Ford (Izzy) just pulls you into it all, she’s a bit like, in a totally different way, Jo Spratley on that just released Mummy album and whoever the male is on vocals right now (Jeremy Van Wyck or Kellen Maclaughlin I assume?) is kind of taking things in the way of Public Image at their very best. There’s a chemistry here, a magic, an alchemy, there’s a witchy otherness and the way they weave it all together is just so so (so) good, the rawness, the flaws, everything. The way they play together the way it all just seems to just naturally happen between them, the Moonshine of it all…
if I have it right, this is their fourth album including the live one, although there was that damn fine split cassette album as well. Everything EarthBall have done so far has been vitally good, it is almost too early to say but this probably (almost certainly) is EarthBall’s best and the way those eleven minutes and forty-three seconds (I like that it is forty-three seconds, I like details like that, the album itself is just a few seconds short of forty-three minutes long), the way they lock it in, the way they lock you and everything else in and just take it all home is just deliciously wonderful, what a fine closing track, just right, what a glorious bit of feedback to close the closing, to just leave it all hanging there. Shall we go around again? Back in for a third time only louder this time?
Earthball are going to all the places they’ve taken us before but now they’re taking us to other places as well, to darker corners, or to (musical) boxes we hadn’t looked in before, and what is she talking about? What was that? I love that they make records that are just like they are live, not live albums you understand, just albums that have everything they have on stage (or in bandstands) – actually I’ve never seen them on a stage, just on floors – just albums that take you a long like they do when you stand in front of them. They are painters, EarthBall paint.
Not all of it is intense, well it it is, but not always in the way you might think, don’t worry, I’m not saying there’s a pop song or anything anywhere near that notion on here, they’re just pushing their own boundaries and being intense in different ways, Hellfire Relations, is a slight departure down a different track, I like it, if Killing Joke were a jazz band? Where I come from it would have cost you what? Oh you better believe all this. Back in, fourth play, five play marathon. let’s go round again… Hadn’t noticed the start of the title track before, lot to still uncover here.hey look, you’ll find more rational considered (proper) reviews in other places in the coming weeks…
I bumped into a musician we’ve worked with lots the other day, a chance encounter on a station, he was off for a curry, I was making recordings for a soundart piece that needed a stinking diesel engine, as you do, he was moaning that there weren’t any good bands any more. There are mate! There’s loads of great bands, brilliant bands (and there’s a pigeon in here, nearly stood on it), there are so so many good bands right now, Yowie, KayoDot, Mummy, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Michael, the various versions of those Flying Luttenbachers, Extra Life, so so many good bands, Earthball are probably my favourite band at the moment, and this is almost certainly their best album yet. One day I might even write a review of it ( just had to close the door, too many pigeons in here and one just thought about breaking the no flying in the studio rule). If it needs to be pinned down, then some kind of psychedelic noise rock laced with a progressive free jazz-influenced art intensity that makes me want to throw all my paintings away and start again… (sw)
Links: Bandcamp / Upset The Rhythm / pre-order
The new EarthBall album is released on November 7th 2025
Previously on these pages….
THE ORGAN 
4 responses to “ORGAN THING: Stop, there’s a new EarthBall album. They are painters, EarthBall paint music and somehow, they’ve dialled it all up even further, this is intense, this is a serious album… ”
[…] Upset The Rhythm, we have already done all the raving and drooling, here’s the link – ORGAN THING: Stop, there’s a new EarthBall album. They are painters, EarthBall paint music and som… There is now a video, here it […]
[…] ORGAN THING: Stop, there’s a new EarthBall album. They are painters, EarthBall paint music and som… […]
[…] The Organ review of said excellent album, Outside Over There, out Nov 7th through Upset The Rhythm can be read via this helpful link – ORGAN THING: Stop, there’s a new EarthBall album. They are painters, EarthBall paint music and som… […]
[…] ORGAN THING: Stop, there’s a new EarthBall album. They are painters, EarthBall paint music and som… […]