The Film

THE FILM is a showcase of intensity: SUMAC ably matches that of Irreversible Entanglements via alternate delivery, while Ayewa’s passion and spoken outbursts meet Aaron Turner’s guttural howl. Looking at the essence of both entities and their respective creative signatures, it’s somehow both remarkable and obvious how natural each of them sound together on this LP.

With The Film, SUMAC and Moor Mother have taken an unprecedented approach, reexamining Afrofuturism through a deliciously dissonant and catastrophic lens, resulting in one of the year’s most essential listens.

Moor Mother and SUMAC are all adept improvisers, uncannily able to gather impulses and sounds that verge on chaos into aesthetic forms that feel saturated with meaning and intent.

Just as it’s often repeated that serious science fiction is written about the present rather than the future; this cinematic soundtrack seems reflective of contemporary reality much more than an invented narrative.

The Film is a powerful work from two unstoppable creative forces on the same wavelength.

Despite these four musicians' predilection towards abstraction, The Film is at its most impactful when SUMAC and Moor Mother's most obvious musical building blocks are conjoined.

Some of the most minimal yet complex, heavy but refined music going. [Jun 2025, p.86]

It’s noisy, it’s militant, it’s human, and it’s a time capsule for the year you’re already burning an effigy of. Get it while it’s hot.

As much as both artists traffic in unboundedness, there’s whiplash in going from a climax with both acts in sync to an extended guitar-and-feedback meditation. However, their shared energy is contagious when the two are in sync, anywhere on the spectrum, from gossamer to explosive. It’s a listening experience beyond the sum of its parts.

The frenetic, almost no wave angularity of that track ["Camera"] calls to mind Last Exit or James Blood Ulmer's most punk-accented moments, while the contrast between hymnal vocal harmonies and brutalist sonics in "Scene 4" recalls Swans' "A Hanging". Early in the closing track "Scene 5: Breathing Fire" we hear one of the album's more conventionally structured post-hardcore movements along with an oblique ascension narrative about “basic instructions before leaving Earth” continuing, “but what do we return to?”.