Denver Band Sungrave Shares Its Secret Post-Metal Recipe

The ingredients used to make heavy music are pretty standard at this point. Of course, distortion and down-tuning are the usual must-haves. Blast beats and double bass drums always add some texture. Triplets and tremolos make for a hearty guitar sound. You can even throw in some bass drops and breakdowns if you’re looking to spice things up. Vocal growls typically bring it all together.

But the burgeoning band Sungrave isn’t interested in making such a traditional dish. Although the Denver four-piece’s post-metal blend includes familiar audial flavors, its secret sauce renders more of a deconstruction and reimagining of what it means to be heavy. Cooking a good meal, after all, is like crafting a compelling story, which is what Sungrave aims to do.

“None of the stuff that we write follows the typical pop or rock formula — verse-chorus, verse-chorus, riff, whatever. It’s an ever-evolving transition into the next part of just whatever feels right,” explains drummer Nate Girard. “I see it as like a movie or a book. It’s just always changing, never going back.”

With only one show under its belt so far, Sungrave is preparing to share its debut album, IDYLL, on Friday, December 20, with a release show at Bar 404. Local post-metal groups Only Echoes and Rumble Young Man Rumble are also on the bill.

In November, Sungrave treated audiences to an appetizer of what’s to come with its second single, “Black Tide.” At just over nine minutes, the track is the only instance in which the band retreads and “loops back” to a particular motif, according to Girard. IDYLL, which was mixed by Austin Minney at All Aces Studio and mastered by Brad Smalling of Evergroove Studio, is “45 minutes of existential dread,” as Sungrave describes it, with each of the six songs averaging around nine minutes in length. That seems to be the sweet spot.

“It would feel weird if we wrote a song that wasn’t nine minutes at this point,” Girard says. “It’s like a roller coaster. We don’t have any songs that are straight into blast beats or typical metal like you would think of, like speed and heaviness. It either starts like that and tapers off and it comes back into it, but each song has its own evolution, on its own.”
Sungrave started as an instrumental trio back in 2022, when bassist Joe Elmore linked up with guitarist Grant Luloff and Girard after posting an ad online looking for like-minded musicians.

The initial idea, Elmore shares, was to play a more mellow brand of post-rock, maybe more in the style of Swans or Pelican, but that quickly changed.

“In the original ad that I posted [I said] I wanted to do more of a post-rock band, something kind of chill,” he explains. “After Grant replied to it, we were emailing back and forth about influences, and we realized we had a lot of similar tastes in music when it came to heavier music, so we explored the idea of adding heavier elements into it. The post-rock sound kind of took a backseat to the doom/post-metal sound, which I’m a big fan of. This is scratching that itch.”

Without vocals at first, the instruments were tasked with doing all the talking.

“When you don’t have vocals to fill an extra space, you have to be a little bit more creative with how you write the instruments,” Elmore says.

Then guitarist Nick Brazzel joined the fold earlier this year and added his lyrical touch to the songs that would eventually comprise IDYLL. “When I joined, the music was already written, so I was just trying to see where I fit in in a way that wasn’t detracting but enhancing the music,” he says. “The writing of the vocals was a collaborative effort between everybody, but trying to emphasize and enhance what was already there.”

Still, Sungrave is “very instrument-forward,” Luloff adds. “We spend a lot of time building up density without vocals, and then we got Nick, and he had that voice that needed to be on the album."

Luloff and Girard also contributed vocals on the record. Musician Lief Sjostrom performed cello on several tracks, while local synth artist hecklifter composed an interlude.

The result is a devastating deluge of heaviness.

“I think the album is a good representation of what we want to keep doing. It’s a very dense mix,” Luloff says. “I just really like super-dense, dynamic post-metal.”

“I feel like we’ve done a good mix of doing that with the dynamic-ness, in addition to adding the vocals,” Elmore adds. “A lot of post-metal bands focus on one or the other.”

While Sungrave is still introducing itself locally, it helps that everyone is on the same page already. It’s certainly not an instance of too many cooks.

“We have this unique aspect where we can read each other’s mind without saying anything. We can all tell when a part needs to be changed and maybe the drum will do a fill and we can all go into another spot without saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to play this part four times.’ It naturally flows from one part into another,” Elmore says.

“It’s a good quality to have amongst other musicians. … There’s a natural flow to the writing and the way the music goes,” he concludes. “The writing for this album wasn’t too strenuous. We all enjoyed it, and that’s not always the case. Sometimes it can feel like you’re doing homework and you’re being forced into writing a part maybe you don’t like. That definitely wasn’t the case for this album.”

Sungrave, with Only Echoes and Rumble Young Man Rumble, 7 p.m. Friday, December 20, Bar 404, 404 Broadway. Tickets are $10-$12.