Beggar might be the heaviest stoner band to ever assail this writer’s ears. The London doom crew take influence from the likes of Black Sabbath and Electric Wizard filtered through a layer of unrelenting, grimy sludge. In their final form, Beggar and their new single “Black Cloud”—streaming below—are closer cousins to Primitive Man or Dopethrone than they are to the stoner legends of old.
“It’s hard to say what made us pick ‘Black Cloud’ for our first single but something felt right about it,” Beggar tell Decibel. “We originally thought it would be a weird choice of track to kick things off with but then came right around to it. The song is like taking a long, unpleasant look at yourself and your surroundings. Some of it has that panicked claustrophobia of the weather setting in. It feels grindingly slow compared to some of what’s to come on the album, but the riffs here are some of our favorites to play.”The new offering is accompanied by a music video, which was directed by Sam Finney. The band explain how it came to be:
“The grainy onstage stuff and the cartoons give it this warped, nineties feel, and the random found footage has this uneasy sense of luxury which is kind of comic and at the same time totally cheap and insipid. We also have some studio footage of this track somewhere from when we recorded it at Wayne’s, but we couldn’t get the words ‘Happy Birthday’ off the bottom of the screen.”
Beggar will release their full-length album, Compelled to Repeat, on April 3 via APF.
