A Shrine by the Sea is the upcoming sixth full-length from Brazilian prog/stoner quartet Gods & Punks, set to drop July 3rd on vinyl and across all the usual streaming haunts via Electric Valley Records.
If you’ve never crossed paths with these guys, buckle up. This band has been quietly building one of the most ambitious discographies in the riff-heavy underground, and this new one is a doozy.
Gods & Punks formed in Rio de Janeiro back in 2013, the brainchild of brothers Alexandre and Pedro Canhetti. They pulled their name from a Monster Magnet song, which tells you a lot about where their hearts live — somewhere between Sabbath’s tar-pit riffs and Rush’s brainy, labyrinthine melodicism.
But “stoner rock” only gets you in the door. Once inside, Gods & Punks have spent over a decade restlessly painting outside the lines. They are kaleidoscopic one minute, bleak and crushing the next, but always thick with that psychedelic weight that separates the real heads from the poseurs.
Their debut, Into the Dunes of Doom (2017), kicked off what became known as the “Voyage Series,” an interconnected, otherworldly saga stretched across four albums: Enter the Ceremony of Damnation (2018), And the Celestial Ascension (2019), and The Sounds of the Universe (2021).
Picture a stoner-prog Lord of the Rings, except instead of hobbits you get fuzzed-out riffage and cosmic dread. Along the way, they also dropped Different Dimensions, a 2020 acoustic charity EP recorded to support struggling Brazilian families during the worst of the pandemic.
After closing the Voyage Series, the band went quiet for a stretch until Alexandre and Pedro reassembled with a new lineup and came roaring back with the Mountains of Garbage EP and their fifth album, Death, both in 2024.
Death is the heavy one in every sense: it chronicles Alexandre’s own near-death experience in 2021, which is about as real as concept albums get. They kept the engine running with last year’s Holograms EP, and now arrive at A Shrine by the Sea.
The album is built from just two tracks, each clocking in at a monstrous 21 minutes and 12 seconds. “The Lighthouse” opens Side A with a wide dynamic sweep, drifting through hazy atmospheric passages before sinking into slow doom and unmistakably Sabbath-indebted riffs, with guest vocals from Andrea Ruocco (ex–Spiral Guru) adding another voice to the fog.
Flip to Side B for “Poseidon,” which trades the doom for something more liquid and psychedelic. It’s patient, spacious, building intensity gradually like a tide coming in rather than a wave crashing down. Fans of Sleep’s long-form doom epics or Causa Sui’s spacier excursions should feel right at home here.
What’s especially cool is how this thing actually got made: tracked entirely remotely, with guitars and drums recorded in Rio by Rodrigo and Gabriel, bass laid down by Pedro in Santos, and Alexandre cutting vocals all the way over in Paris. It’s a genuinely global session that somehow still sounds like one unified, oceanic vision. It was mixed and mastered by Andre Leal and Kleber Mariano at Studio Jukebox in Volta Redonda, continuing the work of the team that helped shape Death. Alexandre himself even painted the cover art, so this is a true vertically-integrated vision from top to bottom.
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