“Our survival is dependent on it… I really feel that people need one another,” says Turner. During the interview, we barely get into details about the album itself — the supergroup’s fifth release — or the accompanying mini tour doc, Six Hours 42 Minutes with SUMAC (dir. Damien Neva). Instead, we dive headlong into the ‘why’ of it all in the face of an uncaring world. 

Across its 76-minute runtime, spread across four tracks, The Healer opens up and operates in a liminal space of melody and drone where contradictions headbang against each other. Each end of a supposed binary untangles from its opposite in order to revel in the parallel experiences of construction and destruction, healing and pain, life and death. The world is falling apart — we are falling apart — and maybe that’s a good thing, as long as we’re able to get back to a communal, creative humanity forged on the connections we build between ourselves.

Photo: Mitchell Wojcik

In stark contrast to the oppressive brutality of The Healer, the process during the creation of the album was mostly emancipatory for Turner and his bandmates. They took the opportunity in the studio to really dig into their 10-year history together as a band and work through new ways of communicating and connecting with each other, especially when they were struggling with wrangling some of the more difficult parts of the process. 

“The recording process itself was really gratifying for me and, I think, for the others, too,” Turner says. “We talked about this quote a bit: we started with a very good foundation of friendship and communication and, as we’ve gone on, that has really deepened. So now, we’re able to talk with each other pretty openly and with greater fluidity about a lot of things, personal as well as creative. It allowed us to approach these songs with a lot of flexibility and playfulness, which is crucial, too.