The Machine – Another Sun
Release Date: 2nd October 2026
Label: Awe Records / Stickman Records / Blues Funeral Recordings
Bandcamp
Genre: Stoner Rock, Prog, Space Rock.
FFO: Elder, King Buffalo, Colour Haze, Sleep.
Review By: Paul Franklin
There are some bands who seem to have been genetically engineered in a secret underground laboratory with the sole purpose of making large amplifiers sound even larger. The Machine are one of those bands.
The Dutch trio have been peddling their particular brand of psychedelic, spacey, riff-heavy rock for long enough now that you might reasonably assume there are no surprises left in the toolbox. And yet Another Sun, their eighth album, manages to feel both reassuringly familiar and just different enough to keep things interesting.
And there’s a bloody lot of it.
Five tracks. Just over forty-three minutes. No messing about with twelve songs that disappear into the Spotify algorithm before you’ve had time to remember their names. Instead, The Machine give each composition enough room to stretch its legs, light a suspiciously large cigarette and stare meaningfully into the middle distance.
The opening track, ‘Drop/See’, sets the tone beautifully. A strange, sitar-like texture gives way to a hefty, rolling riff, before the band gradually start piling on the psychedelic layers. It’s heavy without being in a hurry to prove how heavy it is, which is rather refreshing in a genre where subtlety occasionally gets mistaken for weakness.
Evolver follows with a more immediate groove, the rhythm section providing the sort of sturdy foundation upon which David Eering can happily stack guitars, effects and cosmic weirdness. There’s a looseness to the playing, but never a sense that the band are about to lose the plot completely.
Although, to be fair, losing the plot is occasionally where the fun begins.
In Search Of Yellow takes a more spacious approach, allowing the psychedelic side of The Machine to come to the fore. This is music that rewards volume. Played quietly, it’s a collection of interesting sounds. Played loud, preferably somewhere with neighbours you don’t particularly like, it becomes an entirely different beast.
Then comes Swallow The Sun, the album’s eleven-minute centrepiece. This is where the band really demonstrate their ability to make a jam feel like an actual song rather than three blokes accidentally leaving the rehearsal room microphone switched on. The riffs develop patiently, the textures ebb and flow, and when the heavier passages eventually arrive, they feel earned rather than bolted on for dramatic effect.
Closer Echo Through takes its time too, gradually building its atmosphere rather than immediately reaching for the big riff. It’s a fitting conclusion to an album that seems far more interested in the journey than the destination.
There is, admittedly, a downside to all this spaciousness. At times Another Sun can feel like it’s deliberately making you work for the payoff. If you’re looking for instant gratification, there are probably albums containing considerably more musical carbohydrates available elsewhere.
But if you’re prepared to settle in, turn the lights down and let these five tracks do their thing, there’s plenty to discover.
The Machine haven’t reinvented themselves here, and neither should they need to. Instead, they’ve taken the ingredients they’ve been refining for years—fuzz, groove, psychedelia, space-rock atmosphere and riffs that could probably be detected from orbit—and put them together with enough freshness to make Another Sun feel like more than simply another trip around the sun.
A seriously groovy, gloriously fuzzy and occasionally wonderfully weird addition to the band’s catalogue.
(4 / 5)
