ORB

Playing dark, sonically massive guitar-based rock that's heavy without sounding excessively metallic, ORB hail from Geelong, Victoria, Australia. ORB's music is rooted in late 1960s/early 1970s hard rock, with heavily distorted lead guitar and a simple but punishing rhythm section providing the backdrop. Their debut album, 2016's Birth, earned them the respect of fans of 21st Century heavy rock, and the trio expanded on that LP's stylistic template with subsequent full length efforts like 2017's Naturality and 2024's Tailem Bend.

ORB was founded by three members of the Australian band the Frowning Clouds after that band broke up: guitarist and lead singer Zak Olsen, guitarist and bassist Daff Gravolin, and drummer Jamie Harmer. The three musicians lived not far from one another, and with some extra time on their hands, they began jamming regularly. Inspired by their youthful enthusiasm for hard rock and early metal bands such as Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult, they started writing tunes that drew tongue-in-cheek inspiration from doom rock and psychedelia as well as hard rock. The longer they crafted heavy jams, the more they came to appreciate the style, and the less they approached the music with a smirk. In January 2015, ORB released their debut recording, a five-song cassette titled Womb. Within a few months, the group had earned a solid reputation among Australian heavy rock fans, and they struck a record deal with Flightless Records, the label founded by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. ORB's first vinyl release was a 7" single, "Migration" b/w "Migration 2," that appeared in November 2015. Their first full-length album, Birth, was released in July 2016 by Flightless in Australia and by Castle Face in the United States and Canada. The album received positive reviews in the rock press, and in October 2017 ORB delivered their second LP, Naturality.

The following year, ORB presented their third album, The Space Between, and the band supported the release with extensive live work in Europe and the United States, including tours opening for King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. (King Gizzard even slipped some of ORB's music into "A Brief History of Planet Earth," a nineteen minute jam that closed out their 2020 live LP Chunky Shrapnel.) The 2022 COVID-19 pandemic shut down the band's schedule of live work for a while, and Zak Olsen and Jamie Harmer both devoted time to their side projects (respectively Traffik Island and the Murlocs). The patience of ORB's fans was rewarded in July 2024, when the band issued their fourth full-length studio project, Tailem Bend. Named for a small community in Southern Australia, the music found the band moving further past the conventional boundaries of stoner rock, with pop and funk informing some of the songs, along with their traditional exercises in thunderous fuzz. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi