Name: Howling Giant, Insomniac
Start: 2026-03-11T20:00:00-05:00
Location: 200 41st Street South Birmingham AL 35222

Nashville’s Howling Giant has nothing to prove. Music City’s preeminent heavy jamming psych-wizards formed a decade ago and have been on an enviously productive upswing ever since. With four EPs, a split LP and two full-length records under their belts, not to mention a relentless touring ethos that finds them spreading the riff gospel far and wide, Howling Giant transfix with gorgeous, harmony-laden vocal hooks while hitting listeners square in the gut with snaking, progressive grooves no one saw coming.
Since the 2023 release of their exquisite and widely acclaimed album Glass Future, Howling Giant has taken to the open road over and over, co-headlining a European odyssey with fellow Magnetic Eye Records vibe-hounds Heavy Temple and entrancing North America in support of heavyweights like Elder, The Obsessed, Black Tusk and Mars Red Sky. The solidified trio of Sebastian Baltes (bass/vocals), Tom Polzine (guitar/vocals) and Zach Wheeler (drums/vocals) have honed their craft to a diamond-hard point, still bringing fiery fervor like every show is their first and intensity as it if might be the last.
Now expanded to a four-piece with the permanent addition of Adrian Zambrano on guitar and synths, the band is poised to unleash their third album Crucible & Ruin. Electrified by a dual-axe attack and an absurd wealth of hook-driven, hard-driving melodies, the record is massive, mercurial, and ready to meet the moment.
Crucible & Ruin finds Howling Giant embracing more ethereal textures and wide-open spaces, which makes the hammer-drop of each churning riff and whip-crack drum fill hit that much harder. The mellow sections are smoothly psychedelic sailing, like the pensive restraint that opens “The Archivist” or the contemplative instrumental “Lesser Gods,” but then they turn out a
stuttering bruiser like “Beholder I - Downfall” that’s built around such a toweringly heavy groove that it might have its own weather system. More importantly, at the core are such impeccable songwriting chops that listeners will almost instantly feel they’ve known these songs forever.
Having brought the thunder to hundreds of audiences, each player lays down his licks in generous, sympathetic lockstep. Baltes’s bass lurks and lashes with swooping swings, while Wheeler’s drumming lands in a perfect sweet spot between Dave Grohl and Neil Peart. Polzine’s and Zambrano’s guitars paint a widescreen palette of laser-focused hooks and
beautiful atmospherics, from the heaving bounce of “Melchor’s Bones” and the nervy dual-guitar overlay of “Scepter & Scythe” to the mile-wide grin of a groove that pops up toward the end of “Hunter’s Mark.” Across the album, multiple voices mingle in golden harmonies that float atop the earthbound pummel of the instrumentation.
Howling Giant has nothing to prove, yet they’re still out there doing the damn thing. Crucible & Ruin is heavy music in pursuit of lightness, and points toward a better world by staying deeply present in every tricky fill, every songbird riff, every canyon-deep groove, every desperate refrain. Like daybreak poised to crest the horizon, the world waits for Howling Giant’s twisting,
searching, soaring new album with fervent hope.
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Insomniac isn’t unable to sleep,Insomniac CHOOSES to evade sleep. Between the waking world and our dreams exists the surreal.
In pursuit of that space between, some of history’s most prominent visionaries would hold a physical object, like a spoon or a ball, while sitting in a chair, and allow themselves to succumb to sleep. As they drifted off, the object would fall, and the sound would awaken them at the periphery of unconsciousness. Now more alert than ever, their work could begin.
Such is Insomniac. A band that exists between this world and the next. A bouncing ball on the sound and rhythm of the universe. An aural guide. Writing their songs in the frequency of the earth, the Atlanta-based quintet's sound casts the light on the magic and strange beauty in the balance between unconsciousness and dreams.
On their debut record, Om Moksha Ritam, released September 2025 via Blues Funeral Recordings, Insomniac delivers a brooding, heavy, and psychedelic journey, both physical and abstract. The duality of the experience is for you to experience. Every trip is different. Every spin reveals another layer.
Here exists something new, unique, and incomparable. A band that made the music they wanted to hear because it needed to exist. What you choose to do with this information is your choice alone – but don’t sleep on it.