Perhaps in another life, Dutch live sensation Cloudsurfers would have called themselves ‘’Stormchasers”. Because that’s pretty much how their mutant strand of garage punk, post-grunge and psychedelic rock rolls. One moment their songs swarm at the heart of the breakneck G-forces, the next they’re ghostriding the expressway to hook-laden alt-pop nirvana. 

Cloudsurfers’ second album Subhuman Essence – out September 15 2023 – is a daredevil attempt to match the group’s boisterous stage hijinks on record. There’s a feverish, festering energy permeating through these ten tracks, channeled through five individuals like a jolt of lightning. Instead of tracking and layering the instruments separately, producer (and surrogate audience member) Abel de Grefte insisted the band would lay down the tracks live in the control room, letting all the signals and energies smolder into each other. With the risk of one member fucking up ever-present, each take was a high-stakes affair – a full-throttle dart into the eye of a storm – and that awesome wave of relief washing over after nailing it.

Furthermore, Subhuman Essence captures a band urgently familiarizing themselves with one another. The band’s debut album Don’t Know What Hit Me largely accommodated singer/guitarist Thom Liesting’s expressive songwriting; this time around, the group had a larger puzzle to solve. For one, there was the challenge of having the group's two heavy-hitting hombres – Nanne Hatzman and Ramses Hooymeijer – playing off each other’s strengths.

Guitarist Pieter Sloot, meanwhile, stepped into a larger role as architect of Cloudsurfers’ more expansive, adventurous songs. His mark is felt especially on white-hot live favorite “The Moon - Midwest Comfort '' – which often spills over to a good fifteen minutes on stage – navigating that signature Cloudsurfers chaos like a spirit moving a ouija board planchette. Album closer “Hooray” explores a more cinematic side to the five-piece; initially blasting off with a supersonic noise punk surge. Then the song teeters on the edge of the atmosphere; listen closely and you can actually hear the band – almost ceremoniously – switch off their effect pedals, essentially stripping themselves naked of all bells and whistles, as Liesting divulges into the inner canyons of love and despair with manic, heavy metal intensity. It’s as if switching a purple parasol for a black umbrella on a bright, sunny day.

Furthermore, it perfectly encapsulates Cloudsurfers’ rapidly developing chemistry on Subhuman Essence, especially between Sloot’s cerebral composing chops and Liesting’s reality-bending chronicles of misadventure. Bassist Jess van der Zee, meanwhile, is the ultimate tether that keeps all the erratic rhythms and melodies from spiraling into a hodgepodge of noise, discharging guttural heavy-melodic slabs with a perpetually awestruck smile on her face.

Subhuman Essence celebrates togetherness both its sonic execution and its underlying themes, a potent echo chamber for Liesting to lunge at his day-by-day demons. The high-wired “Cheap Cocaine” crunches the membranes like the baddest of benders; the climax of ”Adolescent Love'' features a spleen-rupturing howl that dissolves into a cavernous air-jet rumble. The spry, fuzz-drenched “Contradicting Medication” addresses people who use sleeping medication after they pulled an all-nighter,” according to the band. “Which involves substances that can actually reduce sleep, and the contradictions that lie in that.” That dubious quandary between poison and remedy is beautifully echoed by Levitation in-house artist Simon Berndt, who provides a cover illustration of exotic flowers and surreal anatomical creatures converging around the brain. 

To mix the songs on Subhuman Essence, Cloudsurfers approached producer Michael Badger, who previously worked with Amyl & The Sniffers and SONS, and twiddled the knobs for King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s totemic Nonagon Infinity. The latter album has been one of the defining records that shaped Cloudsurfers’ own formative years, so as far as full circle moments go, that would be an F5 tornado-sized one. As a band at the glorious uprush of their creative powers, Cloudsurfers are off to chase the next storm up ahead, weathering rain and thunder and hitching rides on top. If they happen to crash through a town near you, best get into the pocket.