Experimental supergroup OSMIUM have today unveiled OSMIUM 4, the latest glimpse into their highly anticipated self-titled debut album, due for release on 20th June via Geoff Barrow’s Invada Records.
Combining the talents of Oscar-winning Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, Emptyset’s James Ginzburg, Senyanwa’s shape-shifting vocalist Rully Shabara, and GRAMMY®-winning producer Sam Slater, OSMIUM are a collective that sits firmly at the cutting edge of sound and form. Having first debuted their material live at Unsound Festival, the group now present a fully realised sonic statement that resists categorisation, instead existing in a space where ancient ritual collides with future noise.
Osmium
New single OSMIUM 4 is a haunting, genre-blurring expedition. Guðnadóttir’s eerie, cinematic halldorophone swells meet Shabara’s shamanic vocalisations and Slater’s shimmering, feedback-driven percussion. The result is a spellbinding mosaic of krautrock-inspired rhythms, ambient ritualism, and metallic drone.
Describing the track, James Ginzburg comments: “This piece is an unexpectedly euphoric kraut rock-inflected improvised interaction between Sam’s feedback drum and Hildur’s Halldorophone, while I play percussion on the side of my Zither and Rully chants to a deity that exists only for the duration of this track. All of our instruments have minds of their own, and often it’s just enough to set them in motion with the lightest touch to produce complex textures and suggestions of harmony.”
The band’s debut album takes bold leaps across genres — drawing from folk, doom metal, industrial, noise, and 20th-century minimalism — without ever settling into one. It’s music that invites both cerebral dissection and visceral response, confronting our relationship with technology, identity, and the idea of performance itself.
OSMIUM’s approach is as innovative as its lineup. Each member performs with unique, custom-built instruments — Guðnadóttir’s halldorophone, Slater’s self-oscillating drum, and Ginzburg’s modern reinterpretation of the ancient monocord — all synchronised via a bespoke robotic system that underpins their improvisations. Shabara’s voice, meanwhile, pushes the human body to its outer limits, mimicking machines in a symbiotic blur of biology and circuitry.
While all four musicians bring illustrious careers and heavyweight credentials to the project — including Guðnadóttir’s acclaimed soundtracks for Chernobyl and Tár, and Slater’s collaborations with the late Jóhann Jóhannsson — OSMIUM is a radical reimagining of what collective sound can be. Not a supergroup, but an organism.
With OSMIUM 4 now available to stream, anticipation is building for the full album drop on 20th June. If this single is anything to go by, OSMIUM promises to be one of the year’s most vital, unclassifiable experimental releases.
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