With Desert Smoke, we present a quartet from Portugal that not only blasts stoner rock around your ears, but also has some quiet, psychedelic sounds in its repertoire. The band skillfully demonstrates how this sounds on their albums Hidden Mirage (2018) and Karakum (2019). Sometimes an entire song rolls forward, always straight ahead, led by fat overdrive guitars and almost hypnotic drum accompaniment, accompanied by similarly fat bass lines – Darvaz on Karakum is a good example of this. But that doesn’t mean that the Portuguese don’t also have the long psychedelia that they play just as well in songs like Solar Jam – a relaxed twelve-minute song that comes along in the style of the great spacetrips, builds up slowly and surely and ends in an epic spacetrip that takes us through new galaxies with lots of reverb and delay. An absolutely convincing symbiosis of stoner and psychedelic that we want to present to you at Festival 2025 – the best of both worlds
Desert Smoke
