Review: Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound
You don’t so much listen to The Spiritual Sound as stand before it.
Los Angeles quartet Agriculture—Dan Meyer (vocals, guitar), Leah B. Levinson (vocals, bass), Richard Chowenhill (guitar), and Kern Haug (drums)—channel black metal’s fury into something radiant, even devotional. Their second full-length doesn’t move like a traditional album; it unfolds like a ritual, a slow immolation of the self enacted through feedback and form. What emerges is not orthodoxy or transgression but something more precarious: a belief trembling on the verge of collapse.
From its opening moments, The Spiritual Sound destabilizes its lineage. Meyer has said that the band doesn’t consider this a black metal record at all, and the refusal feels crucial. Black metal’s history—defined by negation, irony, and blasphemy—seems almost too narrow for Agriculture’s scope. Instead, they occupy a borderless aesthetic in which violence becomes devotion and distortion becomes breath. “My Garden” and “Flea” erupt in ecstatic collapse, their tremolo-picked mantras and blast beats moving not toward domination but toward release. “Serenity” and “Micah (5:15am)” transform intensity into luminosity, their screaming harmonies fusing into a cracked chant that blurs the boundary between pain and praise. Across these pieces, Haug’s drumming functions less as meter than as pulse, threading chaos with clarity. Chowenhill’s guitar work stretches across registers, shifting from harsh abstraction to near-orchestral color, while Levinson’s bass hums like the album’s conscience, grounding the chaos with low, meditative insistence.
This pursuit of transcendence through intensity places Agriculture within the loose lineage of so-called “spiritual black metal.” The record shares kinship with Liturgy’s ecstatic deconstruction, Wolves in the Throne Room’s pastoral mysticism, and Panopticon’s mournful naturalism. Yet The Spiritual Sound distinguishes itself through the absence of irony or distance. Where Liturgy theorizes, WITTR mythologizes, and Panopticon laments, Agriculture believe. Their reverence feels lived, fragile, and embodied—belief carried not as doctrine but as wound. In a genre built on negation, this naked affirmation feels quietly radical. The result is music that doesn’t merely gesture toward the sacred but inhabits it, trembling.
Levinson has described the band as “genre agnostic,” joking that “ecstatic black metal” was a convenient shorthand rather than an allegiance. The joke hides something serious: their aesthetic freedom mirrors their philosophical one. Zen Buddhism looms large. Meyer’s years of meditation and his readings of Shunryu Suzuki inform the record’s attention to impermanence and its vision of transcendence as dissolution. To reach clarity, one must abandon form. “Meditation is destruction,” Meyer has said. “It’s not about finding peace, but burning away what you think peace should look like.” Across The Spiritual Sound, that idea becomes audible. Feedback operates like breath, repetition becomes mantra, and noise becomes the very condition of revelation.
Levinson approaches the sacred through a different gate. In conversation, she speaks of Jungian symbols, of reclaiming Christian iconography through queer embodiment, of myth as a living language rather than a fossilized creed. The album’s cover—an image that nods to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, DJ Sprinkles, and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc—captures this union of agony and rapture. The Spiritual Sound is queer in its transcendence, not an ascent away from flesh but a deepening within it. The music’s ecstatic violence becomes a kind of erotic faith, a devotion enacted through the collapse of boundaries between noise and melody, body and spirit, self and sound.
Across “Bodhidharma” and “The Weight,” Agriculture distill that collapse into form. The former, named for the monk who carried Zen from India to China, circles toward stillness without ever resolving—its guitars spiraling like thought in meditation. The latter stretches aggression and serenity until they merge, collapsing polarities into a single gesture. Between them, quieter interludes like “Dan’s Love Song” and “The Reply” act as spaces of trembling tenderness. They are not reprieves so much as absences, the moment after transcendence when awareness flickers back into flesh.
If black metal has long sought transcendence through destruction, The Spiritual Sound reframes that impulse through an almost Buddhist awareness of impermanence. Agriculture’s extremity feels less like self-obliteration than the stripping away of illusion, the realization that form and emptiness are not opposites but reflections. Their crescendos function as acts of dissolution, mirroring kenshō, the sudden glimpse of enlightenment through collapse. The band doesn’t deliver catharsis so much as confront the listener with the raw, vibrating presence of impermanence: blast beats as breath, distortion as meditation.
And this, perhaps, is The Spiritual Sound’s true subject—not transcendence as reward, but as annihilation. To reach the divine is to risk disappearance, to surrender the very contours of the self. Agriculture’s faith—if that’s what it is—recalls Meister Eckhart’s vision of the soul stripped bare before God, Georges Bataille’s notion of the sacred as “continuity beyond discontinuity,” and Simone Weil’s idea that attention itself is a form of prayer. The band’s theology is articulated not through lyric but texture: a doctrine of distortion and decay. Every drone, every harmonic overtone, feels like a small devotion enacted through obliteration, a surrender to vibration itself.
Still, the record never drifts into abstraction. Its power remains resolutely physical. Levinson’s bass murmurs like blood under skin; Haug’s drumming registers as heartbeat. Meyer and Chowenhill’s guitars merge into a luminous blur that refuses distinction, melody becoming noise, noise becoming mantra. Their interplay collapses individuality into communal breath, a sonic enactment of ego-death. Even moments of imbalance—transitions too abrupt, motifs that vanish before coherence—serve the work’s spiritual tension. The album’s unevenness becomes its human pulse, the grain of sincerity beneath the distortion.
Meyer once joked that the band will “one day truly become a Christian band.” It’s hard to tell if he’s teasing belief or testing it, but that tension defines the record’s strange grace. The Spiritual Sound doesn’t offer revelation or redemption; it stages the act of yearning itself. Agriculture believe not in dogma but in sound’s ability to exceed itself—to reach, however briefly, toward the unnameable.
By the album’s end, what remains is neither faith nor despair, but something quieter: the awareness that both arise from the same vibration. To hear Agriculture is to feel that vibration tremble, uncertain whether it is God, nothingness, or the pure sound of being. But as The Spiritual Sound makes clear, perhaps there was never a difference.
4.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
The Spiritual Sound is out now through The Flenser.
