Experimental supergroup Osmium have shared details of their debut self-titled album. “Osmium” is out 20th June via Geoff Barrow’s Invada Records and is announced alongside a new single titled “Osmium 1”.

Alloying burnished electroacoustic soundscapes with dense, metallic drones, barbed rhythms and buckled, bio-mechanical vocalizations, Osmium’s debut album doesn’t try to cast a rigid future. Rather, it tempers a viscous flow of unorthodox speculations that smolders through the distant past, blazing a trail all the way to the frontier of fate. Absorbed by questions about the relationship between humans and technology, tradition and progression, the individual and the group, Osmium channel their experience and expertise into a set of forward-thinking sonic interrogations that skewer established cultural preconceptions. And although genre is acknowledged – the album draws from folk, doom metal, 20th century minimalism, industrial music and extreme noise – there’s never a sense that it’s riveted firmly in place.

While each member brings along a laundry list of accolades, the project is far greater than the sum of its parts. Widely known for her aforementioned soundtrack work and run of acclaimed solo albums on Touch, Guðnadóttir plays the halldorophone, a unique cello-like electroacoustic instrument designed by Halldór Úlfarsson that allows the performer to harness unstable feedback loops. Taking his cues from this process, Sam Slater – who’s worked alongside Jóhann Jóhannsson, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Ben Frost and others – generates rhythms using a self-oscillating drum he custom designed with Koma Elektronik, and Subtext boss and Emptyset member Ginzburg responds in kind, producing booming tambura-like sonorities from a device he developed himself based on the monocord, an ancient single-stringed resonator.

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