Is One Minute Science by Sunna an Unsung Classic, or Has It Been Banished to the Mists of Time for a Reason?

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For about 8 and a half years, our former (and beloved) co-host Dave had been mulling over doing this album. Then one day, out of the blue, he messaged us: I'm coming in I want to talk about One Minute Science by Sunna.

In another timeline, we'd have gotten this out of the way a long time ago. Hell, Chris almost suggested it himself. And yet here he was, unprompted, reopening a wound he'd apparently been carrying since he was fourteen.

One Minute Science came out in 2000, and on paper it shouldn't have needed anyone's courage. Sunna were a Bristol grunge (?)/electronic rock(?)/industrial metal (?)/nu metal (?) band with a genuinely unlikely pedigree: the album was produced by Neil Davidge, Massive Attack's long-term studio partner, and frontman Jon Harris reputedly played on Mezzanine itself. They signed to Melankolic, the label Massive Attack half-owned, then to Astralwerks in the States, and eventually toured with Smashing Pumpkins, A Perfect Circle and Vast, and picked up Best New Band at the Kerrang Awards in 2001. Lead single Power Struggle found itself on the Hollow Man soundtrack and they even almost had a song from their second album appear on the soundtrack to Spider-Man 2. A fate the film industry's collective good sense narrowly spared everyone. This was, by any measure, a band with momentum.

But it didn't pan out. The album stalled at 151 in the UK charts, the press treated it as an inconvenience to be filed under nu metal and dismissed, and Sunna never really recovered - three more records, increasingly hard to find, never on Spotify, cover art that gets worse with each release. One reviewer's verdict at the time, that if Sunna were foreboding and menacing then so were Creed and Bush, turned out to be a pretty efficient way of ending a career.

So why the secret almost nine-year fandom? We get into it properly this week, with...mixed results. Dave defends the record as a load-bearing piece of his adolescence, uncompromising and strange even now. Chris tries, valiantly and with increasing desperation, to make a case for the production doing the heavy lifting. And Mark - hearing it stone cold for the first time in his life - declares it not just bad but the worst thing he's heard on this podcast in very nearly nine years of doing it. Grim.

Nobody comes out of this one agreeing with anybody else. Which is exactly how this podcast used to be, back in the days of yore. Everyone's got a record like this. The question is whether you'd admit it on air.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

04:04 The Sunna Reveal: Dave's Unprompted Text After 8.5 Years

08:11 One Minute Science, Sunna & First Impressions

11:03 The Massive Attack Connection: Neil Davidge & Mezzanine

12:38 Band History: Chillum, John Harris & the Bristol Scene

18:47 Drummer Departures & Mark Richardson's Near Miss with Feeder

19:30 Jon Harris's Accident-Prone Years, Kenya & the Exorcism Story

21:00 Genre Confusion: Nu Metal, Post-Grunge & the UK Scene Comparisons

28:00 DJ Flatline, Bristol Trip-Hop DNA & the Hollow Man Cameo

29:00 The Spider-Man Near-Miss & the Hulk Screening Anecdote

30:07 The Press Reviews: "Tool to Travis" and Getting Savaged

32:11 The Worst Album Art in Music History

35:26 The Follow-Up Records: Two Minute Terror, Third Pin & Global Morning

42:00 Standalone Singles: Swimming with Snakes & Sentiment Attacked

43:26 Track-by-Track Begins: I'm Not Trading & the Production Debate

1:05:10 Dave's Conclusion: A Flawed Nostalgic Safety Blanket

1:07:55 Chris's Conclusion: The Racist Uncle Defence

1:10:36 Mark's Verdict: "The Worst Thing I've Heard on This Show"

1:14:00 Bush, Nickelback & Finding Mark's True Hated Genre

1:17:00 Wrap-Up & Sign-Off