Gig review: Earth at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

“I can’t even speak,” Dylan Carlson announces self-deprecatingly after struggling to introduce the final song in tonight’s positively pulverising 90 minute set at the sold-out Brudenell (The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, off 2008’s album of the same name). “What else is new, I’m an American.”

The guitarist, founder and sole original member of Washington State drone-metal institution Earth, is being far too harsh on himself.

Back at the Brudenell after a prolonged absence necessitated by a serious health condition and the Covid pandemic, Carlson looks notably healthy and fit.

More surprisingly, the usually taciturn musician whose heavily tattooed appearance has softened with age from a particularly forbidding biker to a slightly disreputable uncle who would rather not explain what he gets up to outside of family gatherings is downright chatty tonight.

There are drily funny song introductions (“this one’s a country song that has been popular for a while, but it’s not a hit”, Carlson announces before a doom-laden tune that could clear up a high-spirited honky tonk in less than a minute) and warm declarations of abiding fondness for tonight’s venue, the band’s fans, Leeds and the North of England.

To be fair, tonight’s set would without a doubt be the same towering triumph even if Carlson spent the evening brooding in silence.

With Carlson joined by bassist Bill Herzog and long-time collaborator and key pillar of the Earth sound, drummer Adrianne Davies, the current line-up of Earth provides a jaw-dropping masterclass in power trio dynamics.

Mixing compelling back catalogue highlights (the starkly beautiful, dust-blown country-doom of 2005’s Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method is particularly well-represented) with promisingly strong fresh material from a new album that Carson promises for 2026, Earth are still routinely described as drone-metal, but the group have long since moved on from the glacial, volume-overdosing amp worship of their formative handful of albums.

Although the tempos remain uniformly stately and almost every note is coated in resistance-shattering heaviness and over-driven guitar crunch forever hovering on the brink of succumbing to storms of feedback, model 2025 Earth is an impressively nuanced and melodically rich proposition, drawing from Carlson’s interest in different types of rootsy music and compositional complexity to add enriching variation to muscularly textured riff worship that could easily become monotonously punishing in less capable hands.

There is no idling in tonight’s tight, consistently inspired performance, but the highlights are particularly jaw-dropping in their unflinching, ever-escalating intensity.

Superb new song Scalphunter’s Blues blooms into a pummeling, propulsive slow-burning groove from its minimalist foundations.

Possibly named after Neil Young’s trademark Les Paul guitar, Old Black suggests Crazy Horse extemporizing around brutally beautiful riffs on a burning plain.

Originally a masterclass in desert-dry minimalism, Raiford (The Felon Wind) emerges as a slice of greasy slow-motion boogie, suggesting a heavier, slower ZZ Top.

With Carlson operating his guitar like it was a potentially backfiring power tool, every moment is infused with the joy of playing that is deliciously at odds with the crushing force of the music.