OKLAHOMA CITY – It’s always felt like an unspoken rule that the best and most creatively adept artists in any subgenre or any nested musical category will eventually find themselves drifting out of those easy boxes and constricting classifications.
The best early punk bands grew to more fully embrace reggae or veered into tightened power-pop. The gloomiest progenitors of goth eventually morphed into New Wave and electro, or evolved in jangly, exploratory alt-rock. Even the most adventurous emo acts would leave those genre trappings behind and develop toward something more dense, defined, and dare I say, adult.
Well, if a willingness to break out of your expected boxes is what makes you one of the best in a scene, then someone crown Mad Honey as the reigning rock royals of OKC, because their newest full-length, “Bridge Over Cumberland,” confidently casts off old expectations to craft something firm, unique, and even heartbreaking.
Though plenty of shades remain from their penchant for the gauzy, gliding sounds of dream-pop and the fuzzy, impenetrable walls of classic shoegaze, “Cumberland” is something assuredly different, not forsaking those sounds, but rising and evolving out of them to draw a bigger picture and a new blueprint for the band.
Where their breakout debut LP – 2023’s “Satellite Aphrodite” – showcased a greater willingness to lean into the sharper edges and the grittier, angrier side of “gaze” that moved them beyond the hazy dreaminess of their earliest outings, “Cumberland” builds beyond all of those trappings with something more delicately constructed and collaborative.
From the fleeting acoustic folk-rock strumming and unheralded bursts of punk energy or towering doom (sometimes all in a single song, like standout “Moshfeghian”) to the unabashedly catchy pop melodies of “Reaching” and the unnerving, otherworldly voice-layering of “Somehow,” the songs here never feel like they’re resting on expectations or reining themselves in.
They can begin as simply and as small as possible and build into something epic and massive just as easily as they crash into their own endings, often without warning, rarely overstaying their welcome.
The elements here aren’t all just layered, shoegaze textures anymore, they’re bricks in a larger structure. The jagged post-punk bass tones, sparkling, snarling guitars, cello-like lines, synth pads, and colliding vocals are never swept beneath the atmospherics or drowned out by the fuzz. There’s presence and human hands and, at times, there’s even enough space between the lines for the wind and the light to come through.
Maybe that’s because Mad Honey leaders Tuff Sutcliffe and Lennon Bramlett found a different outlet for their more electronic and synthesized impulses with splendora21, or maybe it’s just because the songs on “Bridge Over Cumberland” were more collaboratively designed and cooperatively constructed. Maybe both.
But there’s a reason why I keep returning to terms like “building” and “construction” and “design,” and it’s the heart of the album, even deeper than its sound and production.
There’s a sense of architecture and physicality throughout the record, with Sutcliffe returning again and again to the imagery of buildings, rooms, and structures, the unshakable landmarks of memory.
It’s floors and curtains, clubs and kitchens, parkways and, yes, bridges, the spaces so deeply burned and buried into our minds that we might just as easily be another brick built into them.
It’s no small thing that the first track is titled “I Am a Wall, I Am a House.”
From the moment that opener fades in – as if it was already playing inside a room you’ve just wandered into – until the final, far-off piano coda caps off the epic, monumental closing title track, “Bridge Over Cumberland” builds itself around you like the warped remembrances of the rooms, spaces, and structures in your past.
Sometimes it’s a house on fire. Sometimes it’s a shelter with a storm outside.
And sometimes it’s a bridge above it all, carrying you away from home and toward, you hope, something like acceptance of whatever you’re trying to be, no matter how different that is from what’s been expected of you before.
Make no mistake, Mad Honey are one of the best products of OKC’s longstanding dreamy, psychedelic shoegaze scene, and “Bridge Over Cumberland” is their strongest work yet, not because it stands as a landmark for that scene, but because it stands alone.
“Bridge Over Cumberland” is streaming everywhere now and is available on vinyl, CD, and cassette at madhoney.bandcamp.com from Deathwish Inc. and Sunday Drive Records.
For more, visit madhoneyband.com.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
