Post-rock
Cardinal Fuzz / Feeding Tube Records · 18 September 2026
“Damn Your Eyes” opens on a bassline that doesn’t budge for seven and a half minutes, and that decision governs everything after it. Above it, Brett Savage’s guitar does as it pleases: high squeals that drift in and out of the mix, textures that smear, and every so often a wall of white noise that swallows the stereo whole. Jack Toker and Chris Hardman neither follow it nor argue with it; they hold. Psychic Tension is the first Dead Sea Apes studio album since Rewilding (2023), and it works this way from end to end.
The title track is the shortest of the five (5:57) and the quickest to get where it’s going. Hardman lays down a dry, barely decorated pattern and Savage pulls his tone toward ground the band hasn’t worked so hard before: desert rock, fuzz, a streak of distorted Americana. On “Severance” the same formula comes apart halfway through, leaving a single repeated guitar phrase to burn itself out.
“Ursa Minor”, nine and a quarter minutes, is where the three of them agree most. Savage drops the noise for a good stretch and plays a slow blues of long, well-spaced notes while Toker sticks to the root and Hardman keeps to the cymbals. It’s the track that earns the record its running time.
The trouble accumulates. Across five tracks and thirty-eight minutes the gesture is always the same: build an immovable base, set the guitar loose over it, wait for the tension to give. It holds up four times running before anyone opens a window, and when the window opens it’s already the end: “Deathless” (8:31) is the only track where the line-up changes, with Toker picking up a guitar too and Vincent Toker adding an acoustic. That air would have done the record a favour much earlier.
Five tracks, thirty-eight minutes, recorded and mixed by Hardman himself, out on Cardinal Fuzz in the UK and Feeding Tube Records in the US since 18 September. What came in between, Rewilder (February 2026), was practice-room material recorded between 2019 and 2025.
Rating: 7/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre