Drink The Sea

If you walked into 16 Toneladas on Thursday night expecting a “concert,” you were already in the wrong dimension. Drink The Sea doesn’t play music — they summon it, like a séance for the sonically obsessed. What unfolded on 4/12/25 wasn’t a gig so much as a cross-continental ritual performed by a rogue’s gallery of alternative-rock demigods who should, by all laws of physics, not exist in the same room at the same time.

But they did. And Valencia was the epicenter of the quake.

You know you’re dealing with something unhinged when the stage lineup reads like a cryptic crossword of cult legend:

• Peter Buck — the architect of R.E.M.’s jangling apocalypse.

• Barrett Martin — the rhythmic shaman from Screaming Trees and Mad Season.

• Alain Johannes — that Swiss Army knife of Eleven, QOTSA, Chris Cornell, basically half the desert-rock universe.

• Duke Garwood — the smoky, spectral force behind so many Mark Lanegan incantations.

• Lisette Garcia — weaving percussive patterns like a street poet of earthquakes.

• Abbey Blackwell — a bassist who plays like she’s tuning the planet’s heartbeat.

If any bartender in Valencia had tried to list that lineup, you’d cut them off for irresponsible intoxication.

Drink The Sea dove deep into their two debut albums, shape-shifting through soundscapes that felt like half-remembered dreams from a parallel timeline. There were moments when the room vibrated like a submerged cathedral, Buck’s shimmering guitar ringing out like bells from a sunken tower. Then suddenly the whole thing would lurch into something darker — Garwood wrenching dread and beauty from his strings, Martin drumming like he was exorcising ghosts one kick drum at a time. Johannes, meanwhile, floated over it all like a mad monk of tone, shifting from delicate melodies to distortion that hit like a fist wrapped in velvet.

And just when the crowd thought they found their footing, the band ripped the floor away with reinterpretations of songs from their former bands — not covers, but rebirths. Familiar riffs arrived mutated, re-wired, reincarnated. It felt less like nostalgia and more like meeting old gods in new bodies.

Somewhere in the whirlwind, filmmaker Tad Fettig slipped in his visual incantations — fragments of PBS-slick documentary craft hacked into surreal, oceanic dream sequences. Projected above the band, the images seemed to breathe, to melt, to ripple with the low-end. It wasn’t clear whether the music was feeding the film or the film was feeding the music — only that the whole thing was alive. Half the audience stared slack-jawed.The other half closed their eyes and let the waves break over them.Everyone had saltwater in their veins by the end.

16 Toneladas is built for sweat, distortion, and the kind of intimacy that borders on dangerous. On this night, it became a floating vessel — a low-slung ship lost at sea, lit by guitars instead of flares. Every corner of the room pulsed with bodies leaning forward, hypnotized, waiting for the next sonic mutation.

By the time the final note dissolved into a humid haze, the crowd looked like they’d survived some shared, ecstatic shipwreck. No one moved toward the exit immediately; they just stood there, blinking, as if daylight might be an insult.

Drink The Sea didn’t perform in Valencia.They flooded Valencia. They poured memory, myth, noise, cinema, and raw human pulse into a single night that left 16 Toneladas dripping with something too huge, too strange, too beautiful to name. It was a ritual, a storm, a tide that swallowed the room whole.

Words and photos: Rhyan Paul