Album review: Melvins – Thunderball

Any attempt to predict what the Melvins are gonna cook up next is the very definition of a fool’s errand. The band’s sound over the decades has proven as fluid as their line-ups, which at different times have included dual basses, double drummers and collaborations with all manner of fellow travellers from Jello Biafra to Mike Patton. Thunderball is supposedly a return to their original Melvins 1983 configuration but, typically, even this isn’t quite the case.

Sure, this album reunites founding mainstay Buzz Osborne and initial drummer Mike Dillard, but also invited along are Bristolian Ni Maîtres and Void Manes from Atlanta, two experimental musicians whose inclusion marks Thunderball as quite different from the last Melvins 1983 record. The eminent silliness of 2021’s Working With God was probably best encapsulated by renamed Beach Boys cover I Fuck Around, a piece which didn’t exactly require avant-garde electronic contributions.

Ironically, though, aside from the ominous interlude that is Vomit Of Clarity, Thunderball includes some of the most irresistible, huge-sounding tunes Melvins have delivered in a while. Eleven minutes allow Short Hair In A Wig to encompass both hushed tension and big-riffing accessibility, while Victory Of The Pyramids marries a bombast-packed intro to hard-driving boogie rawk, before the song moves into an altogether more mystical-sounding second half. Venus Blood, meanwhile, offers a classic slowly-unfurling tense-and-release sonic signature, over which Buzz plays some of the album’s most broodingly melodic guitar lines.

So while only the heads-down opener King Of Rome is presented in a radio-friendly three-minute format, there is much here that could lure newcomers into the twisted soundworld of the Melvins – as long as they don’t expect the next record to sound much like this one.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Torche, Clutch, Boris

Thunderball is released on April 18 via Ipecac