Newcastle’s drone wizards enter the intoxicating realms of inner space.

Newcastle’s drone lords Bong have long been the astral traveller’s band of choice, but their latest journey to the beyond is marked by real world fears

You don’t have to be out of your mind on recreational drugs to appreciate Bong. No, really. The Newcastle-based droning avantdoom collective have a reputation for pushing slow riffs, dense fuzz and woozy atmospherics to their most disorientating, illogical extremes, but guitarist Mike Vest insists that the band’s new album, Thought And Existence, represents a perfect midpoint between mind-bending, exploratory art and the big, bilious riffs that bind our whole world together.

“Oh, we’re not that hard to get into,” he chuckles. “A lot of drone music can be a bit daunting for a lot of people, but I think we’ve captured that idea and done something else with it, so it’s much easier to get into. Sometimes it’s just really hard to get out, ha ha ha!”

A band seemingly conceived to confound perceptions on several levels, Bong have spent the last 13 years ploughing a defiantly singular furrow. With countless split and DIY releases, both official and not, and now eight full-length studio albums, Mike’s crew have become major players in the doom and stoner world without ever toeing the stylistic party line. Similarly, their status as drone mavens comes with an acknowledgement that Bong’s music doesn’t strike everyone as being inordinately far out.

“That’s true. In the stoner and doom scene we’re regarded as incredibly experimental,” notes Mike. “But in the scenes that we grew up with, all the Skullflower and Ramleh stuff and that whole era of avant-garde bands, we’re not that experimental at all. For some people it’s ‘What the hell are they doing?’ and for others it’s ‘Oh, OK…’ and they shrug and walk off, y’know? Unbeknownst to us, we’ve managed to cross-pollinate both things.”

It’d be easy to infer that Bong have never approached any of their music with a meticulous plan. This is music born from rambling, stoned jams that happen in dark, smoke-shrouded rooms, and yet Thought And Existence is manifestly the band’s most rounded effort to date. As Mike explains, this self-confessed “fairly medicated” band have plenty of method to mitigate their lysergic madness.

“We spent a lot of time on production with this one, more than any of the other albums,” he says. “Normally we record it all in two days, we get the jams down and then start mixing. This time it was a massive four days! So this is the first album that we’ve done where we’ve done any major overdubbing. We did some overdubs on the last record with gongs and such, but on this one we spent twice as long in the studio. It’s very heavily produced.”

Thought And Existence was mixed by Adam Richardson from Ritual Productions peers 11Paranoias and noted studio guru John Foyle, who has previously worked with Bobby Womack and Gorillaz. Not an obvious choice, perhaps, but sometimes it helps to bring in the experts.

“Oh mate, John is choice!” beams Mike. “He uses an old analogue-to-digital mixer… and it took a while. It’s not easy to mix Bong, man! With everything being so on the edge and so simplistic, any error that comes up can completely destroy 15 minutes of music. If anything slips on that seam, it can really fuck things up, so it’s not easy.”

Partly due to their intermittent habit of puncturing the pomposity that can hang around heavy music’s artsier fringes – see 2014’s sardonically titled Stoner Rock for proof – Bong have occasionally edged towards the dreaded cliché of a blissed-out doom band, making it up as they go along and struggling to stay upright. The truth is that even through a thick, green fog, Mike and his bandmates have their collective focus firmly on the deeper meanings conjured by their deeply immersive, cosmos-embracing music. On Thought And Existence, Bong’s trademark cosmic curiosity is tempered by more reflective, melancholic atmospheres, as if today’s real-world turmoil is being absorbed into the prevailing reverie of slow-motion riffs.

“We’ve tried to incorporate the idea of space being an outward and an inward entity,” Mike states. “All of our albums have been expansive outwards, but this one is expansively inward, if that makes sense. It’s heavily linked to star maps and that kind of thing. But everything comes from how we’re feeling. How can you not be affected by everything that’s going on? When you think how utterly reductive the world is being at the moment, how could that not influence you? Especially in Newcastle, things are pretty rough up here art the moment. But it’s not the first melancholic record that’s ever been released. A lot of these things are concerns for everyone, notions of a sense of place and belonging, and all of that.”

It is perhaps surprising that Bong have even acknowledged the real world on Thought And Existence, given the hallucinatory, amorphous nature of their music to date, but even celebrated masters of the drone can’t defeat the passing of time.

“It’s probably a lot to do with reflection over time.

A lot of things have changed in our lives. Our bassist has had two kids over the past three years. It’s just life stuff, things changing,” Mike states. “We’ve done a few albums now and this is just a time of reflection. Socially, too, everyone is contemplating what we’ve been shown and beginning to realise that a lot of it’s fake. If we’re saying anything specific, it’s that you need to live your life now, instead of worrying about a future that might not exist.”

Maybe this is the key to Bong’s power as a band: when you find yourself in the eye of their somnambulant squall, surrendering to the enveloping warmth of those lumbering riffs and embracing the hypnotic charm of the drone can provide willing participants with some genuine escapism, release or relief. As Mike suggests, despite its sonic heft, Bong’s music is self-evidently meditative by design, even though its impact can vary wildly.

“What we do can be quite relaxing, even if people think it’s quite extreme,” he shrugs. “It’s a form of meditation, for sure, but I suppose you could say that it might take you somewhere you don’t want to go. People do lose their minds. I’ve seen people doing cartwheels while we’re playing. I saw another guy hugging a monitor. It affects people in different ways. But no matter what state we get in, we always want to make sure we’re doing what we’re meant to be doing. There’s a responsibility there. I do feel a responsibility now, to provide that escape for people.”

As comfortable playing “in some squat in Leeds” as they are topping the bill at arts festivals, Mike and co seem to have reached an unusual point of equilibrium. Entirely independent and self-contained, their freewheeling approach to droning doom sets them apart from just about everything else, and yet they fit perfectly into an otherwise vacant slot in the Venn diagram of heavy.

But as seriously as they take the role of occasional windscreen wipers for humanity’s third eye, Bong are still ardent advocates for the notion that surrendering to the void can, and should, be fun.

“We’re not gods of time. We’re just people in a band, messing around like everyone else!” Mike laughs. “We enjoy the freeness of being able to create. We just like to play, because it’s class. It keeps you in the right state of mind and I think we all need that right now.”

THOUGHT AND EXISTENCE IS OUT NOW VIA RITUAL PRODUCTIONS. BONG PLAY THE BLACK HEART, LONDON ON JUNE 29

“WE’RE NOT HARD TO GET INTO. SOMETIMES IT’S JUST HARD TO GET OUT”

MIKE VEST ON WHY BONG ARE A ONE-WAY TICKET