Listen to 30 Seconds of Sunbomb, the “Black Metal” Project From Stryper’s Michael Sweet and L.A. Guns’ Tracii Guns

We first heard about Sunbomb, the new project from L.A. Guns guitarist Tracii Guns and Stryper singer Michael “I’m Not Ted Cruz” Sweet, back in May, when Guns said that the music would have a heavy black metal influence:

“I love black metal. I love black metal more than I love a lot of other things. Because black metal has a certain element of Randy Rhoads in it that people might not really identify that, but I always have. There’s something about the double picking and the way the chords are structured and the weight of the music.”

Guns’ claim immediately struck some of us as odd, less because the guitarist isn’t at all known for playing black metal and more because Stryper is Christian.

Now the Sunbomb album has been completed and Sweet has shared a thirty-second sample on Facebook and… well, here, listen to, then let’s discuss:

So that’s not really black in the most obvious sense; by which I mean, when we think of black metal, the stuff we think of probably doesn’t sound like the Sunbomb sample. There’s just too much singing and melody, as opposed to croaking and music recorded from inside the human colon.

Having said that, I see why Guns classified this as “black metal” — there’s a very Mercyful Fate quality to the music which one might more successfully categorize as “proto-black metal.”

Regardless of what sticker you wanna slap on Sunbomb’s sound, I think that sample is mighty promising. I’m always curious what Guns is up to, but this is the first time in my entire life that I’ve given a shit about something involving Sweet, and I’ve deliberately gone to see Slaughter live. So.

Sunbomb’s album should be out in 2021. It will likely not contain a cover of “WAP.”