A brooding pall spreads over the landscape as deep and dark as the shadow of a bat’s wing. It must be time for Somergloom.
The three-day heavy music festival returns to our stages Thursday through Saturday. Sixteen bands, two stages, three days. The event kicks off with a four-stack bill at Deep Cuts in Medford on Thursday night, then rotates back to Somerville with doomers Body Void and postmetal impresarios Sumac anchoring Friday and Saturday night, respectively, at the Crystal Ballroom.
The festival that loves to muck about in melancholy has a reason to put a smile on its proverbial face this year, which marks its fifth anniversary. With long-running traditions such as Boston Calling and the Rock N Roll Rumble hitting the hiatus button, it can only warm the cockles of our undead hearts to see Somergloom creep out of the crypt once more.
What does five years represent in the lifespan of a music festival? Long enough to make memories with a tight-knit community of musicians, visual artists and oddball creatives, but not quite long enough to get your own Wikipedia page. So let’s fill in the information gaps before AI hallucinations beat us to it …
Somergloom was born in 2021, rising out of the ashes of a live music scene that was looking for a path forward in the waning days of the pandemic. Organizers Stephen LoVerme and JJ Gonson had a vision for a festival curated to showcase heavy music – music that gives voice to a unique and melancholic mood they sometimes call “gloom.”
The word “gloom” evokes images of gothic spires, numinous fog banks, wolves howling at the moon and late-night B-movie horror thrills. Do we need a set of plastic fangs to get in the proper mood? Musician and Somergloom veteran Kira McSpice (2021-2024) set us straight about what makes heavy music “heavy.”
“The definition for me would be: emotionally intense,” McSpice said, “There’s some weight to the music, which, I guess, you know, is ‘heavy.’ It’s not just heavy metal. It’s not just these grating tones and screaming and stuff.”
Case in point, Kira McSpice’s latest album “The Compartmentalization of Decay.” The album illustrates the elasticity of the term “heavy music,” redefining weight in terms of spiritual intensity. On her album’s approach to “heaviness,” McSpice remarked, “The lyrics are pretty, just, weighty. That album is about trauma, and how I dealt with a particular trauma in my life.” In 12 songs, the album plays out like a goth opera, exploring themes of injury, perseverance and healing in delicate and haunting tropes.
Somergloom veterans such as McSpice remember the early years of the festival at Boynton Yard. The property, which has been under construction since before the lightbulb was invented, hosted the first two years of the festival in 2021 and 2022. Some recall the location as less than ideal: The asphalt was red hot. A train passed behind the main stage every 20 minutes or so. And the port-a-potties were, well, port-a-potties. But to devotees of heavy music, Boynton Yards was the start of something beautiful.
Somergloom left the construction yard after 2022 to begin its nomadic journey through the various venues and stages of Camberville and beyond. In 2023 the festival spread itself across three days at three locations: opening night at The Rockwell in Somerville, the second night at Bone Up Brewing in Everett and the closing night at Garage B in Brighton. That’s three out of three opportunities to not use a port-a-potty (in case you’re counting) while enjoying music from Marissa Nadler, Seed, Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean, Elizabeth Colour Wheel (their farewell show), Ashen Veil and more.
Somergloom set up shop in 2024 at at the Armory for two nights, featuring headliners Big Brave and Royal Thunder, with supporting lineups that amplified the local heavy music community while peppering it with fresh faces.
The multivenue and multiday presentations took what Somergloom had built at Boynton Yards and platformed it in new ways. The move reflected confidence on the organizers’ part that the heavy music community would come out for the same event in different, expanded and more ambitious formats. But it also reflected the basic underlying reality that a music festival needs to be nimble in the face of market forces to stay afloat.
Organizer JJ Gonson described some of the challenges that festivals face in the current economic climate:
“Everything has gone up: insurance, royalties, etc., when the reality already was that to pay bands what they are worth, to pay for the venue, to pay for advertising, etc., we have to apply for any grants we can find, [we] need to rely on everybody coming to the table to volunteer and hope people buy tickets.”
In other words, evolve or die – and grab those art subsidies where you can. There’s a dark art of alchemy to finding the right blend of ingredients that will make the festival machine go year after year. Bands, venues, ticket prices, promotion. How the pieces will puzzle together is never a given. But through the uncertainty Somergloom organizers have done a remarkable job of staying true to their gloomy vision, curating bills that triangulate the melancholy mood, assembling a mix of acts with local, national and international draw.
This year’s edition reflects the familiar gloomy vision in new and surprising ways. Look forward to heavy hitter headliner Sumac. The post metal trio closes out the festival on Saturday night – and it’s possibly the first “supergroup” to have played Somergloom. Notwithstanding guitarist Aaron Turner’s local bandography (Isis, Old Man Gloom), Sumac, with bassist Brian Cook (Russian Circles) and drummer Nick Yacyshyn (Baptists), represents the festival’s growing ambition with respect to out-of-state marquee headliners.
Other highlights that can’t go without mention … The first Boston-area appearance by “chamberdoom” act The Keening, a solo project from Rebecca Vernon (ex SubRosa) … A set by Puerto Rico’s Moths, who will be concluding their U.S. tour at Somergloom with a front-to-back performance of their latest album “Septem” … A rare gig by Boston doom veterans Morne … A bold genre-adventure into “immigrindcore” by New York’s Nepalese-language Chepang … Lesotho to preview unreleased songs from forthcoming EP … And the return of Body Void to Somergloom for the first time since they played the debut edition in 2021.
One highlight you won’t experience is a fifth consecutive appearance by Kira McSpice. She’ll be watching from the sidelines this year. But she’s not sweating it:
“Oh, I’m so excited. I mean, I’m so excited to see my friends. I’m excited for Sumac, Body Void, A Monolithic Dome, Vudu Sister. I’m super stoked. As always, it’s perfectly curated and I cannot wait to go,” McSpice said.
What draws her back as a spectator is what has drawn so many people to Somergloom over the years: the sense of community. Whether they’re playing music, designing the poster, volunteering at the door, booking bands behind the scenes or just rocking an Ozzy Osbourne (RIP) T-shirt in the crowd, the festival has forged a sense of collective self among like-minded music fans for five years straight – and that’s a cause for celebration.
Of course, you can’t celebrate without cake. If Somergloom was a cake, what kind of cake would it be?
“Very, very, very dark chocolate,” answered Gonson, “Maybe decorated with some blood red roses, including thorns.”
“I would shape it like a gargoyle, our unofficial mascot,” LoVerme added.
Let’s get baking, because you only turn 5 once.
A stronger
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