Yeah Bagel

Some bands arrive like a statement. Earth Tongue arrive like something has been unearthed.

Not discovered exactly. More like disturbed. A sealed chamber cracked open under the stage. A blacklight flickering on inside a prehistoric arcade machine. A riff that has been asleep in the rock for a thousand years suddenly blinking, stretching, and demanding to know where the nearest amplifier is.

Earth Tongue are not a large band. On paper, they are almost comically compact: Gussie Larkin on guitar and vocals, Ezra Simons on drums and vocals. Two people. Six strings, two voices, a kit, enough fuzz to make the floorboards question their life choices. But the sound does not behave like a duo. It behaves like a cult film projected onto a cliff face. It has weight, colour, movement, claws. It lurches. It glows. It sweats.

They come out of Wellington, New Zealand, but they have never sounded geographically tidy. There is something unmistakably Aotearoa about their isolation, their weather-beaten oddness, their refusal to dress the music up in industry polish. But Earth Tongue have always felt less like a local scene export than a signal leaking from a private planet. Heavy psych, doom, garage, occult rock, sci-fi fuzz, B-movie horror, 1970s animation, old paperbacks with lurid covers, melted candles, dungeon corridors, homemade portals. Their world is not retro because retro is too clean. Earth Tongue sound like the old future got buried in the mud and came back with worms in its circuitry.

The band began in the mid-2010s, when Larkin and Simons started shaping something that could carry both heaviness and hooks without apologising to either side. This matters. A lot of heavy psych is happy to be impressive, foggy, enormous, and occasionally quite boring. Earth Tongue avoid the swamp by giving the monster a tune. The riffs are huge, yes, but they are also memorable. The vocals often arrive in strange, chanting, almost robotic harmonies, like instructions being broadcast by a doomed space colony. The drums do not simply keep time; they shove the thing downhill.

Their debut album, Floating Being, arrived in 2019 and gave the band their first proper mythology. It was sci-fi without cosplay, psych-rock without incense-shop wallpaper. The songs had the directness of garage rock and the dense, radioactive hum of something stranger. It was a record that understood the pleasure of the riff, but also the pleasure of the image. You could hear the videos before you saw them. You could see the posters inside the songs.

That visual instinct is part of the Earth Tongue code. They do not just make tracks, they build little cinematic ecosystems: cheap horror, cosmic fantasy, handmade effects, dungeon doorways, monsters rendered with cardboard and conviction. There is a proud trash-art intelligence to it, a feeling that the best portals are built in the lounge with gaffer tape, a borrowed camera, and absolute belief. In Earth Tongue’s universe, low budget is not a limitation. It is a moral position. It keeps the fingerprints visible.

Then came Great Haunting in 2024, the second album, and with it the band’s horror wing opened properly. The title alone felt like a mission statement. Here was Earth Tongue stepping further into the damp corridor: bodies dissolving, shadows lengthening, riffs moving like something under the floor. If Floating Being looked up to the sky, Great Haunting looked into the house and found the house looking back.

But the trick was that the music never became merely gloomy. Earth Tongue understand that horror needs motion. A haunted record still needs legs. Their heaviness has bounce and bite. It is not sludge for the sake of sludge. It is fuzz with teeth arranged into a smile.

The move from New Zealand to a more international circuit sharpened the band rather than sanding them down. They toured hard, made converts in strange rooms, and built the kind of following that comes from doing the job in front of actual bodies. Not algorithmic haze. Not playlist mist. Rooms. Vans. Bad routing. Good nights. Weird nights. Soundchecks. Merch tables. The slow priestcraft of making a band real.

That matters because Earth Tongue’s music depends on physical persuasion. You can admire it on headphones, but you probably understand it better when it is pushing air at your chest. Two people making a room feel overpopulated. Two people conjuring a full procession from drums, guitar and intent. There is no hiding place in a duo. No decorative second guitarist. No bassist holding the furniture steady. Just the bare bones and the beast.

By the time Dungeon Vision arrived in 2026, Earth Tongue had turned their private obsessions into a trilogy of sorts: sci-fi, horror, fantasy. Not in a neat prog-rock concept-album way, more like three shelves in the same haunted video store. Dungeon Vision was fantasy, but not the shiny kind. No noble quests, no clean swords, no wise old wizard who smells faintly of pipe tobacco. This was fantasy as trapdoor, as stone wall, as cursed treasure, as the feeling that the map is lying to you.

Produced by Ty Segall in Los Angeles, Dungeon Vision did not make Earth Tongue sound less like Earth Tongue. Good. It made them sound more concentrated. Segall’s best work as producer tends to understand performance as combustion, not decoration. Earth Tongue did not need a makeover. They needed someone to catch the sparks without putting the fire out. On Dungeon Vision, the riffs feel carved, the drums feel restless, and the melodies keep appearing in the fog like warning lights.

Symmetry Dripper

“Symmetry Dripper” starts Yeah Bagel’s Open Format Transmission 2026.03, which feels exactly right. Some tracks open a mix politely. This one kicks the hatch off.

As an opening piece, it does not behave like an introduction so much as a forced entry. It is instrumental, angular, strange and compact, a little mechanical goblin of a track that seems to drip patterns onto the floor and then dare you to follow them. It is Earth Tongue in miniature: heavy but nimble, weird but not evasive, playful in the way a cursed object can be playful before it starts rearranging the room.

Placed at the front of the transmission, “Symmetry Dripper” works like a key turning in a lock. It tells the listener that the next two hours will not be a smooth service. There will be fuzz in the mechanism. There will be wrong doors. There will be songs that arrive covered in stickers from other dimensions.

It also proves something about Earth Tongue that can get lost when people describe them only through genre terms. Heavy psych. Doom. Garage. Occult rock. These labels are useful enough, but they do not quite explain the band’s sense of design. “Symmetry Dripper” is not just a jam or an interlude. It has architecture. It moves like a diagram being animated. It is clever without putting on a little scholar’s hat. It knows when to jab, when to curl, when to let the riff do the talking.

In the Yeah Bagel world, that makes it perfect opener material: a portal disguised as a floorboard.

Two People, One Creature

The romance of Earth Tongue is partly the romance of limitation. Two people can only do so much, which means every choice has to earn its oxygen. Larkin’s guitar is not just guitar; it is bass, atmosphere, lead line, weather system, blunt object. Simons’ drumming is not just rhythm; it is counterweight, propulsion, architecture, argument. Their voices do not float above the music in the usual rock-band way. They often sound embedded inside it, like figures painted into the cave wall.

That creates a particular kind of intimacy. Earth Tongue are heavy, but not impersonal. The sound is huge, but you can still sense the two humans operating the machine. That tension is the good stuff. The band sound both enormous and handmade, both cosmic and close enough to leave fingerprints on your pint glass.

Their work also refuses the dull binary between “serious” and “fun.” Earth Tongue are serious about the craft, the songs, the world-building, the performances. But they are not solemn. Solemnity would kill this music. It needs colour. It needs monsters. It needs the joy of a ridiculous title delivered with total conviction. It needs the part of rock music that still believes a riff can open a crack in ordinary life and let something ridiculous, ancient and glowing crawl through.

That is why Earth Tongue feel important in 2026. Not because they are reinventing rock from scratch, whatever that exhausted phrase is supposed to mean. They are doing something better. They are reminding heavy music that imagination is not garnish. It is the engine.

So much contemporary guitar music either begs to be taken seriously or hides behind irony until the songs evaporate. Earth Tongue do neither. They build their castle out of fuzz pedals, horror videos, fantasy rot, tour grit, melodic instinct and two-person telepathy. Then they lower the bridge and invite you in, possibly unwisely.

Earth Tongue are not revivalists. They are not archivists. They are not a moodboard with a drummer. They are a working band with a handmade universe, and every record has pushed that universe further out: from floating being to great haunting to dungeon vision.

The title Dungeon Vision sounds like a joke until you realise it is also a pretty good description of what Earth Tongue do. They see in the dark. They make the dark move. They find the rhythm in the tunnel wall. They hear something dripping in the symmetry and decide, correctly, to turn it up.

“Symmetry Dripper” is the opening track of Yeah Bagel’s Open Format Transmission 2026.03