UK Doomgazers Sugar Horse Talk Heaviness, Creative Limitations & Eighties Pop (Interview)

Heavy music doesn’t have to mean ‘metal’. That’s the philosophy of Bristol, UK-based doomgazers Sugar Horse. The four-piece are even reluctant to fully embrace their genre tag. They begrudgingly accept it works in terms of outlining the parameters of their dense, textural music, but are keen to not be constricted by its boundaries. The term works because it captures the odd contrasts and weird paradoxes that Sugar Horse so intuitively channel. They flick between sincerity and irony, austerity and flippancy and heavy and gentle with surprising elegance, casually pushing the boundaries of heavy music without ever imposing their uniqueness.

Their latest EP Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico (released on 3rd November via Fat Dracula Records) pushes even further into conceptual strangeness - one eighteen-minute long track, split into six unpredictable parts. It’s the second collection on the bounce (following 2021 debut album The Live Long After) on which Sugar Horse have taken an intriguing u-turn. 2022’s Waterloo Teeth was another EP with a unique conceptual hook - each of the four tracks featured a litany of guest musicians, including members of Conjurer, Heriot and Biffy Clyro and many others.

We caught up with Sugar Horse vocalist/guitarist Ashley Tubb and guitarist Jake Healy to talk their unique aesthetic approach, Bristolian origins and, erm, U2.

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First up, because I’ve heard you’re all fans, can you explain why everyone is wrong and U2 are actually great?

Ashley Tubb: Ah man, we’re not claiming that every U2 record is great, we’re not psychopaths. Achtung Baby is probably where I stop, I dunno about Jake.

Jake Healy: Pop for me. They go downhill after that (laughs).

Ash: The Edge’s guitar playing, whether people like it or not, is some of the most influential, beautiful guitar playing ever. They also just had these huge, undeniable songs. Some people are really annoyed by Bono, but he doesn’t annoy me that much. 

I feel like a surprising amount of eighties pop creeps into your music. For example, the vocals on the opening track of this EP remind me of Simple Minds. What is it about that sound that you’re into?

Jake: A lot of those bands U2, Simple Minds, Big Country just have these huge sounds and great songs.

Ash: In comparison to a lot of bands in our sphere, that write around riffs, our songs are more based around the music as a whole, rather than parts. Because of that, they tend to be quite simple. We try to strip everything away and focus on what’s immediate. That sounds weird because we’ve written an eighteen-minute long song (laughs). 

I love the term ‘doomgaze’. I know it’s tongue-in-cheek, but it fits you well. What other acts would you place in the doomgaze pantheon?

Ash: It’s a useful descriptive term, but I don’t think we always sound like that. Jesu would be associated with the term, that’s got to be up there. My friend Tom in Planning For Burial, they sound like that. Also Have A Nice Life, they’ve been labeled that.

Jake: I’m trusting Jake with this. There’s probably more shoegaze bands that we like, in terms of what we listen to.

Ash: As a band, I wouldn’t say any of us are metalheads. We all like some heavy bands, but none of us are focused on that stuff.

That’s interesting. I recently spoke to Takiya from Divide & Dissolve and she straight-up said “I don’t listen to metal” and her music is super heavy.

Ash: You can hear that. There’s loads of heavy-sounding indie rock from the last twenty years that, in my opinion, sounds way heavier than a lot of metal. For me, My Bloody Valentine’s “Slow” or Mogwai’s “Like Herod” are unbelievably heavy, but I don’t think anyone would call them metal.

Jake: It’s about how you contextualize something. If you don’t expect something to be heavy then sometimes it gets heavier. A lot of metal tries to get it across and fails.

For overseas readers, can you talk a bit about how Bristol and its scene helped create the conditions for your band?

Ash: I think the cool thing about Bristol is that it’s not the particularly done thing to start a band that starts like another band. There’s a healthy competition where everyone’s forced to come up with their own slant on something. 

Jake: We’re lucky that there’s so many venues and people putting things on. It can get overwhelming, in a good way. It means that bands can just develop. Everyone here’s pretty open-minded and they trust you to do something that’s creative.

It felt like you guys emerged pretty fully-formed in the post-lockdown period. When did you properly form?

Ash: The band first came together in 2015, but we fucked around for ages and didn’t do anything of merit. Jake joined in 2019 and in that period there was a lot of planning - a lot of ideas of what we wanted to do and what we didn’t want to do. We don’t do it so much now, but we used to have a lot of rules about what we could or couldn’t play. Limitations force you to work things out.

I love your track titles, are they nonsensical placeholders or is there some absurdist logic to them?

Ash: The songs normally get a name before the lyrics are fully written. Often it’ll cause some offshoot that’s used in the lyrics. Again, it’s a limitation that forces you into writing about something.

In terms of limitations, the quote in the press release about this new EP was that it’s an ‘exploration of the note A in all its forms’. I get that it’s also tongue-in-cheek, but is that an example of these limitations? 

Ash: Definitely, yeah. That note A thing comes from when we first started playing shows. Because of how simple the songs are, people used to take the piss saying ‘I can’t believe you just play the note A for ten minutes’. I like the idea of taking something that’s a joke at your expense and using it to create something.

One thing I really like about you guys is how you smash together opposites. Whether it’s heavy and gentle or ironic and sincere. It’s almost metamodern and just feels really new.

Ash: Some sort of weird middle ground where no one knows what’s going on (laughs).

Jake: We get some confused reactions. People ask why do you have funny song titles for such apparently serious music. But like you said, it’s fun to play around with the lines between sincere and ironic.  

I feel like your music is formally funny. It’s not that there’s jokes, but there’s something witty about the unusual way it moves and is shaped.

Ash: I laugh all the time at how ridiculous music is. Me and Jake love The Fall. People who don’t fully know that band will think that it’s avant-garde, serious poetry when it’s full of jokes and stupid shit. They did a live album once where they walked off half-way through the set and they tracklisted the walking off on the album.

Your previous release was a huge undertaking, with a ton of great guest musicians. I wanted to ask if you could explain a bit about how you put that one together?

Ash: The original idea came during lockdown. We were having video calls with people about making long-distance records together. Lots of people do split records or collabs with two artists, but we said why don’t we make life incredibly difficult for ourselves and have four different guest musicians on every song (laughs).

We thought, because our songs are simple, people could come in and do things over them and it wouldn’t feel like a mess. It was simple, but as we got closer to the deadline it was a bit like herding cats. It was fun, but I probably wouldn’t do it again (laughs).

Jake: It was fun having people from different genres. We all listen to a broad scope of music, so it was fun getting people from different worlds in and seeing what they could do. We just gave them total freedom. 

Ash: We pre-warned people that they have total freedom, but we also have freedom to edit them out.

Last thing I wanted to ask - if you could do a dream collaboration track with three musicians who would they be. You can say U2 if you want.

Jake: (Laughs) Well we wouldn’t need Bono, so yeah the other three from U2 would be fine.

Ash: I’d say maybe Kevin Shields, but I wouldn’t want it to take fifteen years.

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Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico is out now via Fat Dracula Records. Get it here.