Live Review: Sunn O))) - Birmingham

Live Review: Sunn O))) – O2 Institute, Birmingham

2nd July 2026
Support: Black Mountain
Words: Michael Chew
Photos: Natalie Chew

SUNN O))) are not the kind of band you casually pop along to see. At the O2 Institute in Birmingham, their set felt like being stood inside a vast, slow-moving current of sound. It was heavy, immersive and genuinely physical; the kind of performance that you leaves trying to work out whether your internal organs have quietly rearranged themselves during the set. Birmingham has heard its fair share of heavy music, but this was a different kind of sonic weight entirely.

Before all of that, though, Black Mountain gave the evening a beautifully measured opening. Their set began softly, almost carefully, with a delicate intro and vocals that seemed to wrap themselves around the room as the lights slowly warmed the stage. It had that rare quality of being able to pull people in gently, and the room responded by falling still.

As the set built, the sound gained more weight without losing that tenderness. The second song opened things out, bringing in a slow, bluesy rock feel that rolled and stretched before easing back into something gentler. Stephen McBean’s guitar had a slow, bluesy looseness to it, letting notes hang in the air before pulling the song forward again. It suited the mood perfectly: unhurried, and quietly absorbing.

There was a real warmth in the crowd during Black Mountain. Couples stood with arms around each other. People swayed without making a big performance of it. One man near the front gave himself fully to a bit of air guitar, which felt entirely fair. Sometimes the spirit arrives, and who are any of us to deny the imaginary fretboard?

The lighting helped carry that mood. At first, it was all warm reds and golds, like the last of the sun catching the stage, before deeper greens, purples, blues and magentas crept in. It gave the set a strange twilight feel; soft, psychedelic and just a little uncanny. Black Mountain did not feel like a support band filling time before the main event. They felt like the dusk before the night came down.

And then there was SUNN O))).

Even before Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson appeared, the stage had become a spectacle in itself. Twelve Sunn Model T amps were lined up like a warning. Watching the techs turn them on felt oddly ceremonial, which sounds ridiculous until you are stood in front of that much equipment and realise the backline has more stage presence than most bands.

Motörhead played over the PA while smoke began to thicken across the stage. Then Lemmy’s voice appeared, addressing a crowd somewhere in the ether, and for a moment it felt like the old gods of volume were being summoned one by one. When O’Malley and Anderson finally appeared in their robes, the room stilled. Smoke rolled across the stage, catching the light around them as they took their places in front of that huge wall of amps.

That first note was extraordinary. Both men raised their picking hands together, struck the strings, and the sound hit with ridiculous force. It did not simply come out of the amps; it seemed to occupy the room in one huge movement. You felt it through your feet, your chest, your teeth, the small hairs on your arms. The word “loud” barely covers it. Plenty of bands are loud but this was something else entirely; pressure, vibration, patience and menace, all moving at a glacial pace.

The fog kept pouring across the stage, sometimes from behind them, sometimes from the front, until the whole thing started to feel like watching a ship come slowly into dock through impossible weather. Every so often the haze would thin and the two figures would appear again, caught in hard beams of light from above. Then the smoke would fold back over them and they would vanish into it. Watching from the stalls they completely disappeared into the fog, leaving only the sound of their guitars reverberating through the room.

There is a strange beauty to SUNN O))) live, and it is easy to miss that if you only talk about the volume. The sound is punishing, yes, but it is also incredibly controlled. O’Malley and Anderson know exactly how long to let a note hang, how far to push the feedback, when to turn towards the speakers and let the guitar howl back into the room. The higher frequencies cut through the low-end like something sharp catching the light. The drones moved slowly, but they were never static.

Everywhere, people stood with their eyes closed, completely absorbed. Nobody seemed to be waiting for a chorus or a drop or any kind of conventional release. That is the peculiar magic of SUNN O))). You either stand outside it and wonder what on earth is happening, or you step into it and let the whole thing take over like a wave. Last night, Birmingham allowed itself to be immersed in sound.

There were moments where the sound felt genuinely wicked, in the old sense of the word. Deep, dark, and slow enough to feel ancient. Sound that could probably summon something unpleasant up through the floorboards if given half a chance. Yet there was tenderness in the performance too. At one point O’Malley and Anderson bowed to each other across the stage, a small, human gesture inside all that smoke and force. It landed beautifully.

That contrast ran through the whole evening. Black Mountain brought warmth, colour and loose-limbed psych-rock grace. SUNN O))) arrived afterwards like the robed usher of night itself, leading the room somewhere far heavier and stranger. The two sets should have been wildly different on paper, and they were, but the transition worked. One made the room glow and the other made it tremble.

By the end the fog, the amps, the robes and the sheer physical weight of the sound had left the O2 Institute reeling. It was devastation by decibels, but delivered with absolute control.