"Take the title of The Spiritual Sound as a kind of syllabus, and you'll find a heady list of musical reference points that Agriculture aim to exalt. The jarring intros of black metal songs that make you feel like a portal to Hell has opened inside your headphones. The sound design on later Scott Walker arrangements meant to conjure a Biblical plague. The slow, majestic build of post-rock epics that hold back their climax for maximum transcendence."
"The Spiritual Sound is one of 2025's most daring metal albums, and a lot of it comes down to how well Agriculture know themselves. The Los Angeles quartet will be the first to square their righteous politics with the day-to-day realities of making their band financially sustainable. "Our job is that we sell T-shirts and the way we promote those T-shirts is by playing music," vocalist/guitarist Dan Meyer confessed in an interview. "If we were talking strictly economically, that's just a fact.""
The Spiritual Sound blends black metal's jarring intros, Scott Walker–style apocalyptic sound design, slow post‑rock builds, threadbare '90s indie ballads, and Slipknot-style riffs, preserving the murky in-between alongside stark contrasts. Agriculture channel daily-life hums and vulnerability into nightmarish lyrical images while allowing earnest moments such as 'Dan's Love Song' (chorus: 'I will always love you'). The Los Angeles quartet pairs righteous politics with pragmatic economics, treating merchandise sales as core income and promotion. The result is a daring 2025 metal record that balances extreme sonics, melodic hooks, and emotional directness.
Read at Pitchfork
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