In an age of blandness, doom-jazzers Flux Hound have shifted within, channeling photosynthetic ritual on their latest release, Moss Opera. Here’s a sneak peek at the raw tracks.

It begins with a low pulse—subterranean, sticky, the sound of blood dragging through collapsed veins. Then a shimmer. A murmur. A bass that remembers something it shouldn’t. A cello being rescued from a swamp. Dual desert-rock guitars? Welcome to Moss Opera: Flux Hound 8.0.

Flux Hound doesn't make music so much as they conjure states of being—forgotten ones, ignored ones, ones buried alive. Not once have they asked what something means, just what that particular something sounds like alone at night, gnashed by mold and memory.

The title of the quintets latest conceptual epic seems a tad misleading. Moss Opera. Understanding the band’s bent for threading a subversive narrative through varying albums over the years (2008’s Blood Tuning springs to mind; an album assumed to be the sound heroin makes when streaming through the veins) I thought that perhaps this latest saga may have been an ambient delve into the nether world of flora and frequency. Plant music. Boy was I wrong.

Don’t let opening track Chlorophyllia fool you. Yes, the unmistakeable Wolfgang Völker guitar drone is there, and for the first time on a Flux Hound album, a cello, both haunting and brittle, played masterfully by latest addition Rose Hamill, the muse, backbone and essence of black metal icons, Schlüsselchrist.

Even the tactically diversionary Michael Raüm drum melt lingers… for a short while. But by 3:18 on track 1 the listener is struck by one pertinent question: where’s the jazz? The brooding build up to a spectacular orgasm? The tantra? Where’s Virgil Brock and his unmistakeable signature saxophone?

Before the questions are even processed, the answer is provided. The immediate blast into stoner rockdom with track 2 Sporelord tells all. Oh, this isn’t a soundscape in which to help plants grow, it’s a desert rock hellscape. Jazz, if it were boiled in tar, set adrift in Death Valley and left to fester deep in Josh Homme’s asshole. That’s cool, just a monumental mindset shift required… okay… track three.

Flux Hound’s stated aim is simple: to bring the clandestine elements of life into the realm of sound. Pretentious? Sure. But the band remains unapologetic:

“Flux Hound is forensic. Curious. Ritualistic. We ask questions most musicians don’t even know how to phrase.”

— Wolfgang Völker

But that mission gets twisted into knots the moment you engage with Moss Opera. How is an eleven-song instrumental stoner concept album forensic?

“Well it’s about addiction, obviously. Nature’s addiction to life, and to death. We are all inextricably linked to the third universal law of thermodynamics. Entropy. So like it or not, we are both living and dying in the same breath. Might as well be addicted to it all. Also, sometimes we just like to bang our heads to loud, obnoxious music.”

— Wolfgang Völker

Moss Opera covers all those bases and, I can’t believe I’m about to write this, actually captures the photosynthetic dreams of moss perfectly. Instead of using a root system to anchor and gather nutrients, moss instead uses rhizoids, a spongy component able to not only absorb moisture and minerals, but to absorb history. As esoteric as this may seem, moss has the ability to store the psychic murmurs of structures left abandoned, a quiet spiral of memory loss, or even a distant human emotion or vibe. Moss operated on a frequency forgotten by the rest of nature, and Moss Opera has bottled that for time to preserve. Also, it’s one beast of a stoner album.

Beneath the desert, it’s a harsh, fungal kingdom—plant nightmares, doom rituals, and mycelium acting as not only chief communicator, but the overseer, much like Rose Hamill’s droning cello threaded throughout the album. She is the mycelium, and makes a unique addition to the Flux Hound line-up in the absence of signature saxophonist Virgil Brock who is currently on hiatus.

This album is survival as sacrament—eleven songs, no vocals, no narrative voice to hold your hand. Just instrumental doom, stoner dirge, and a desert-summoned hallucination. Where most dark-jazz acts reach for weight through crispness, Flux Hound does it through decay. Melodies erode like compost (think 2003 debut Demolished Man) Ezra Knowle’s basslines stretch into fuzzed-out mycorrhizal networks, drums thud a ritual stomp of pollen-faced cultists gathering under a blood moon, and Völker’s guitars screech as if a dead language. This, according to the band, is what photosynthesis sounds like.

But beauty exists here too. Cello-dominated tracks such as Chlorophyllia, Communion, and We Buried Him in Peat lull the listener into a meditative state, a beauty before ruin technique used by musicians and shamans alike for centuries.

Yet somehow, Moss Opera is the band’s most accessible work to date. Maybe because it’s rooted in genre forms—desert rock, doom, stoner grooves—but reshapes with the slow, deliberate patience of plant life. It lingers. It spreads. It colonizes your attention. Play it twice and you’re infected.