Pretoria’s Acid Magus doesn’t mess around with half-measures. Their new album, Scatterling Empire, drops today through Mongrel Records, and it’s a beast of a thing—raw, sprawling, and heavy with intent.
Right from the first riff, it’s clear this isn’t just music to nod along to; it’s a plunge into the cracked mirror of human history, where colonial scars and defiant spirits tangle in a haze of psychedelic doom, moody alt rock, and more niches.
The band—guitarist Keenan, drummer Jethro, and vocalist Rico—drew the album’s core from a grim well: the relentless grind of conquest. “We all feel oppressed at times. That feeling resonates with the stories of conquest throughout human history,” they say, their words carrying the weight of lived frustration.
“Colonialism and its unquenchable thirst to conquer culture and uniqueness has threatened the very fibre of what makes us who we are.” What started as a reflection morphed into something bigger—a “fantastical tale” that fits the slow burn of their sound like a glove.
The result is a journey that kicks off with thunder and lands, nine tracks later, in the eerie quiet of “Haven,” a song that lingers like a ghost of what’s been lost.
Making Scatterling Empire was a shift for Acid Magus. Keenan kicked things off with home demos, rough sketches of riffs and moods. Jethro and Rico piled in, each twisting the material into something sharper, stranger. “This time, we took everything into the studio for the first time,” they note, pointing to High Seas Studios and engineer Jacques Du Plessis as the crucible where it all came together. The DIY grit’s still there, but it’s polished now—less a basement jam, more a controlled explosion.
Sonically, they’re pulling from the giants—Led Zeppelin’s swagger, Black Sabbath’s heft, Kyuss’s desert sprawl, Hendrix’s wild edges—but they’re not just mimicking. Acid Magus stirs in punk’s snarl and psych’s drift, ending up with something they call “fast, slow, heavy, moving, and massive.” It’s a fair tag. The album swings between gut-punch heaviness and stretches of eerie calm, never letting you settle too long in one spot.
The themes cut deep. Colonialism’s long shadow hangs over every note, not as a lecture but as a felt thing—anger and sorrow woven into the fabric. Yet they’re not here to preach solutions. “We should meet each other in the middle, cast our differences aside, and attempt to live in peace,” they say, and you can hear the hope in it, faint as it is. But then there’s “Haven,” the closer, a track that doesn’t so much end the album as leave it hanging—displaced voices calling for a home that’s gone. It’s not a tidy bow; it’s a wound left open.
Acid Magus doesn’t spoon-feed meaning. They toss it out there—culture’s resilience, history’s cost, the ache of uprooted lives—and let you wrestle with it. The sound backs it up: doom that growls, psych that swirls, riffs that hit like a fist.
For anyone into Mastodon’s heft, Kylesa’s edge, or Elder’s sprawl, this’ll stick.
