If William S Burroughs made psychedelic indie rock, it might sound like Spirit Of The Beehive’s 2021 outing Entertainment, Death, a cut-up experiment layering restless guitars over a shifting landscape of sonic abundance. Refusing to adhere to genre limitations, it veers minute-by-minute from glitchcore to found sound to synth-pop and everything in between. What could be indulgent is instead tightly strung, as wild in its ambition as it is accessible to a general audience. 

Striking a more forbidding path in American experimentalism is Earth’s 73-minute masterpiece Earth 2 (1993). An impressionistic squall of gnarling guitars and distortion, the three songs comprising this ambient metal gem evoke primitivism in its most inchoate form, like our universe being sucked backwards into the gnashing jaws of the Big Bang. ‘Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine’ is the stand-out track, scraping listeners across the hot coals of its fuzzy chords for 27 minutes before chewing them up on a wave of unanchorable feedback.

Other E listens: Electric Ladyland by The Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968), Eggsistentialism by The Lovely Eggs (2024), Entertainment! by Gang Of Four (1979).