Methuselian played Tmuna Theatre in Tel Aviv, Israel, on July 31, 2026, in a room where the heat was impossible to separate from the music. The Israeli trio work between stoner doom, sludge, repetition, throat singing, and sudden changes of pace. Their first full-length, …And the Monks Played Rock&Roll, arrived in 2025 after the 2022 EP Beyond Human. The band describe the album as a meeting point between heavy music and traditional sounds associated with Tibet, Australia, Mongolia, and Altai. Live, that mixture did not feel like a list of influences. It became a performance built from competing kinds of weight.
Flags hung overhead and plants crowded the stage. Smoke and weed sat in the air. Ariel Beker’s throat singing moved underneath the guitar and bass rather than sitting on top of them as an ornament, and guest instruments entered at intervals before disappearing again. The visual language suggested ritual, but the room did not behave like a congregation. People moved constantly. Crowd surfers passed over heads. When the band accelerated, the floor responded more like a punk show than a doom set.
That contradiction became the night’s governing image. Methuselian can build a riff slowly enough to make repetition feel ceremonial, then break the same structure open with speed and movement. The heaviness stayed intact, but it did not demand stillness. The people around me were sweating, pushing forward, lifting one another above the floor, and laughing between songs. The performance looked solemn from the stage and felt unexpectedly joyful from inside the crowd.
Behind the trio, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain ran throughout the set. The 1973 film follows a Christ-like thief into the orbit of an alchemist and a group of powerful figures before sending them toward a symbolic mountain and the promise of immortality. Its religious, alchemical, grotesque, and deliberately artificial images gave the stage another layer of ritual without explaining what the band were doing. Beker’s throat singing, the long repetitions, and the guest instrumentation met Jodorowsky’s images as parallel forms of excess. The film kept changing behind the band while the music kept returning to its central weight.
For a doom audience, the title The Holy Mountain also carries an obvious echo: Sleep released Sleep’s Holy Mountain in 1992. I would not turn that shared title into a claim of direct influence, but the association was hard to avoid in this room. When I saw Methuselian at Stonerfest in Haifa two years earlier, I heard the Sleep resemblance much more directly in the riffs and pacing. At Tmuna, the connection felt less like imitation and more like lineage. The band had kept the slow, low foundation and built a much more specific ritual world on top of it.
Black Sabbath framed the night from another direction. Sabbath played over the PA before Methuselian began and returned after the set. From the stage, the band spoke Ozzy Osbourne’s name just over a year after his death, then went into “Snowblind” from Vol. 4. That choice did not need a speech around it. The song placed Methuselian inside the history that made this kind of heaviness possible, while the performance around it showed how far the vocabulary has travelled: from Birmingham riffs to an Israeli trio using throat singing, didgeridoo, guest instruments, psychedelic film, and crowd movement inside the same set.
The strongest moments came when those elements stopped behaving like references and started affecting one another. Jodorowsky’s images made the slower passages feel stranger, but the crowd surfing prevented the set from hardening into solemn spectacle. The ritual imagery gave the music a frame, while the physical response in the room kept breaking that frame open. Methuselian’s own records already place heavy music beside traditional sounds; at Tmuna, the audience became another part of that collision.
By the end, the heat had not lifted and the room had not calmed down. The Holy Mountain was still moving across the screen, Sabbath returned to the speakers, and people were still talking over one another as they came back down from the set. What stayed with me was not the idea of escape that I reached for in the original version of this report. It was the opposite. For an hour, Methuselian made the room more physical: hotter, louder, stranger, and more crowded with bodies, images, and sound.
