Earth Tongue’s Dungeon Vision
It’s a uniquely immersive experience listening to an Earth Tongue record. We aren’t reflecting on personal issues or day to day musings, but being brought into an entirely new and fantastical world. Dungeon Vision, the third album from the now Berlin-based psych rock duo, scoops up the listener and plants them firmly in an alternate place, space and time. A world of castles and dragons, of demons and fantasy. The gritty riffs and pounding drums keep the listener firmly locked in, soundtracking the stories from start to finish. It’s a brilliant expansion of the band’s discography and Earth Tongue’s ability to create worlds never fails to impress. This album and the accompanying visuals are a testament to their creative prowess and a reminder that more doesn’t always equal better. What these two people manage to accomplish is utterly astounding.
Earth Tongue at Last Place in Kirikiriroa, Hamilton. Feb 2026. Photo: Brad Miller
Listening through the album in full is truly transportive. I can see the moat lowering and the flashlight flickering in my mind's eye, following along with the characters and hoping when I hear “feeling overwhelmed, the terror is around… we walk towards our death” in ‘Living Hell’ that they get out alive. This kind of narrative storytelling in music is not one I’m used to and I wondered what drew Earth Tongue to this kind of fantasy imagery. “I think at the start of Earth Tongue it was a really great outlet because I had my other band, Mermaidens, that felt like very personal lyric writing and quite emotionally true and this was a really fun side project to explore completely fantastical world building imagery. We've just really stuck with that because I think it fits the aesthetic that we really like,” Gussie explains. “Throughout the band's life we've journeyed through music that we're inspired by, and we've gotten more into cinematic worlds as well, so it's grown together in a way. We started out with the first album with broadly sci-fi and then we went more horror and now fantasy just made sense.”
It’s this commitment to the theme that also lays the perfect foundation for incredible visuals. “While we're songwriting and talking about the lyrics and the characters, we are visualizing the dungeon and the moat, the drawbridge coming down. I really do see these characters rather than comparing it to a more introspective way of songwriting about your emotions or your internal world. This is like this dreamed up external place.” Earth Tongue are no stranger to creating their own high-value cinematic music videos, with them spending the same amount of time and effort on those as being in the studio. “People are waiting for our music videos now. They're quite attached,” says Ezra, who is also the director and cinematographer on many, if not all, of their videos. And I get it! They are stunning. For many artists, a music video sits alongside a song to prop it up, but with Earth Tongue they sit in tandem, an extension of a rich, vibrant world.
Dungeon Vision, though often simple in form, letting rhythm and atmosphere do the heavy lifting, has layers of sound that bring dimension and a fullness that baffles me. I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d ever thought about getting a bassist. But as Gussie explains, the bass tones do actually exist in the performance: “In my pedal setup, using an octave pedal, I split the bass octave to a bass amp and also using a bass amp simulator [...] What the audience hears is the guitar amp as you would normally, and then the bass amp is fully isolated from the guitar so it really just sounds like a three-piece.”
It’s this restriction that has actually made way for Earth Tongue to stand out, using the unique parameter to their advantage. “The limitations that come with that have created our sound,” she goes on. “The bass is always doing what the guitar is doing because it's just following along. A lot of people in the psych rock genre are very noodley and jam on crazy wah pedal solos for ages, but we just can't do that. This is kind of what has shaped us into a band that's heavy and weird but we also write quite poppy structures because it has to be doable for two people.”
This idea of using constraints to prompt creativity is evident in the creation of the album too. After spending years on their 2024 album Great Haunting, fussing over songs and re-recording, Dungeon Vision was recorded and mixed in just ten days. The two enlisted garage rock superstar Ty Segall for this task and now had to not only work within his busy schedule, but the analogue process he employs in the studio. “The production of it was interesting and new for us because we recorded it entirely to tape and mixed it analogue as well. So there's no computer involved until the very end when you bounce the track onto the computer,” Gussie muses. “It was fun discovering these new ways of manipulating the sound. We had one song where we slowed down the tape after we'd done the drums and the guitars, so it pitches it down slightly and gives this really sort of languid feeling. And then with another one of the songs we sped up the tape while it's recording [...] it almost sounds like you're getting sucked into a wormhole.”
Photo: Nicola Sandford
“I think previously I've been a bit lazy going into the studio because I know that everything is so easily fixable,” she continues. “This was like ‘all right just perform it well and it'll sound good.’ [...] So it was an adjustment that we had to make, and it made for a different record, for sure. It's a lot more raw, referencing lots of 70s records. It intentionally doesn't sound like a modern record. It sounds like something that you'd find in the attic and blow the dust off.” A perfect choice to pair with the ultra-fuzz guitar tones that Earth Tongue are known for. Getting into the studio with songs still being written and working on the fly, especially under such tight time and process restraints infuses the album with adrenaline and urgency, bringing their live energy into recorded form. “It was a ‘diamonds made under pressure’ situation,” Ezra says, and I couldn’t agree more.
Near the end of our conversation Ezra pulls out the special gate-fold edition of the record designed by Lily Paris-West. It’s beautiful. Stunning hand-painted illustrations, embellished gothic lettering with a metallic silver finish, portraits by Nicola Sandford, each detail meticulously considered. The strong aesthetic across the print, along with their music videos and the intentionality of their music, is another string to the bow of the world they’re creating. I endeavour to get my mitts on one as soon as possible.
The release of Dungeon Vision coincides with a busy year for the duo. They are currently halfway through their six-date Aotearoa tour. Dunedin, Christchurch and Wellington people, you’re this week and you don’t want to miss this! Then they’re off to Australia, then Europe, and after a short break, back to the US. Phew!
Big thanks to Gussie and Ezra for chatting to us!
You can get tickets for the tour here.
Gig photos by Brad Miller at the Hamilton show of the Dungeon Vision tour. | IG: @_who_is_mitch_ (thanks Mitch!)