Ceremony can’t stop. Can’t stop pushing forward. Can’t stop changing shape. Across two decades, the California-born hardcore outfit has earned its standing as one of punk’s most adaptable and unflinching bands, always ready to meet the moment without surrendering its principles. True to form, Ceremony’s seventh album, Tell Me Your Dream pushes the group’s punk-forged intensity all the way to the fore, capturing the quintet at its most expressive, most expansive, and most timely.
“We’re living in an era of mass uncertainty,” says Ceremony vocalist Ross Farrar. “In punk, I don’t see how you can’t respond. It’s taken over our lives in so many different ways — economically, politically, spiritually. We want people to wake up and get into what’s happening.”
Ferociously alert, Tell Me Your Dream reunites Ceremony — Farrar, guitarist-keyboardist Anthony Anzaldo, guitarist Andy Nelson, bassist Justin Davis and drummer Jake Casarotti — with producer John Reis for ten songs of searing breadth. That means everything from bristling hardcore to moody post-punk — all while taking fundamental inspiration from Discharge, Crass, and other anarcho-punk troupes that first helped certain members of Ceremony find their own political voices back when they were teenagers. The result is a culmination of the band’s 21 years together, if not some kind of riddle: Ceremony knows how to make a return-to-form sound like evolution — and vice versa.
Equally loud and clear is the fact that Ceremony isn’t hesitating to raise its voice at a moment when the underground has grown strangely quiet. “Why aren’t punk bands actually saying the word ‘Palestine’ on their records?” asks Ceremony guitarist Andy Nelson. “We didn’t want to make anything that felt light, or empty, or apolitical. Our intent is to not waste anyone’s time, and to encourage people to think about what they settle for.”
On Tell Me Your Dream, you’ll hear Palestine cited over the ferocious bounce of “Madness,” a post-punky indictment of war’s obscenity — and the obscene amounts of cash required to wage it. But if you listen closely, you may also hear Farrar working to reconcile issues of broadscale sociopolitical violence with his most intimate personal struggles. “If you write a political song, it can have this black-and-white effect,” Farrar says. “I think Ceremony is good at walking the line on that. This album is very much about the inside and outside battling, and trying to find a way.”
Hard subjects, harsh sounds. Tell Me Your Dream finds a steadying hand in producer John Reis, a punk lifer whose eclectic noisemaking in Rocket from the Crypt, Hot Snakes and other legendary bands runs in parallel to Ceremony’s multitudes. After working on Ceremony’s acclaimed 2015 album, The L-Shaped Man, Reis maintains a unique perspective on the quintet — as a hardcore punk band, as participants in the greater California rock-and-roll tradition, and as friends. “John sort of joined the band on this one,” says guitarist-keyboardist Anthony Anzaldo. “We could not respect him more as a guitarist, as a singer, as a songwriter. He understands what it’s like to be in every position. So we really gave him the keys.”
Together, they’re unafraid to shift gears. Within the space of 30 minutes, Tell Me Your Dream revisits all previous eras of the greater Ceremony arc, with each track gaining intensity as it plays off the prior. Check out how the anarcho scorch marks of “Other Hells” give way to the deep-pocketed groove of the aforementioned “Madness,” followed by the jet-black jangle of “Dark Summer,” a post-punk rumination during which Farrar reminds us, “You only hit bottom when you stop digging.” Such wild swings — from rage to beauty and back again — might feel familiar to attendees of Anzaldo’s Homesick music festival where Ceremony’s incandescent headlining performance in 2019 seemed to channel preceding sets from electro-punks Cold Cave and avantgarde harpist Mary Lattimore at once.
All of this is made possible through an enduring sense of trust forged within the band — no surprise considering Ceremony’s roots date all the way back to a grade-school friendship between Anzaldo and Farrar. “We’re bound together like family,” says Anzaldo. “Our relationships are beyond the band. Ceremony is going to live no matter what. We’ve shifted into this dynamic where the choice isn’t ours anymore.”
Deep connections in a shallow world. A clear sense of purpose in uncertain times. These are the reasons Ceremony continues to grow, to expand, to adapt, to endure. This band can’t stop. And it won’t. To meet the moment, you have to be there for it.
Building off the strengths of their critically acclaimed works, POISON RUIN return with their new album, Hymns From the Hills. The Philadelphia Punk band have developed their signature approach to grim mythmaking and scythe-swinging aggression in bold new directions, offering up a new body of songs that strike one as equal parts natural, undeniably of this world, and phantasmal.
The band’s vision has grown substantially, pushing well past the tales of peasants and serfs that stood as allegories for contemporary alienation in their previous work. On this newest offering, their previous stories of toil and dispossession are revealed to be but one chapter etched upon a bleaker tapestry- One populated by spirits traversing sunless deserts and wilted hillsides, demonic torture objects limning the edges of the psyche, bodies transfigured into Luciferian snakes, Sadean prisoners bound to the screaming silence of abandoned castle towers. The record is at once a forceful restatement of POISON RUIN’s trademark sound and a departure from it- The crackling, cassette-dubbed darkness and crushing rhythms listeners have become accustomed to are buttressed by a carefully sculpted mosaic of new textures, from flourishes of Killing Joke hacksaw primitivism and blast-beats worthy of the Relapse catalogue number to crisp analog synth lines and ambient serenades reminiscent of Scott Walker and The Durutti Column. Like a serpent moving ever outward with spiraling circularity, Hymns From the Hills expands POISON RUIN’s sonic landscape in imaginative new directions while maintaining its center of gravity firmly in the band’s already established mythos.
Hymns From the Hills is meticulously composed. Much like the rest of POISON RUIN’s body of work, this LP was self-recorded without the use of professional studio equipment. To meet the greater sonic demands of Hymns From the Hills, however, mastermind Mac Kennedy relocated to a private practice space, retiring from his previous routine of squeezing in tracking sessions around the rare moments that the band’s shared practice space happened to be vacant. “Having added time to breathe and really get things right felt crucial this time,” he remarks. “The stress of having to work quickly and at chaotic intervals used to feel productive, in that it instilled a sort of rough, energetic ethos into the recordings, but I began to feel that those working habits were blocking me from pursuing certain ideas that required a more measured, methodical approach.” To best serve the record’s grander ambitions, the band enlisted the mixing prowess of Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, Career Suicide) and the mastering of Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Trapped Under Ice, Cavalera, Integrity), who helped to elevate the record’s teeming variety of sounds to new heights of self-assured fidelity. Kennedy lent a second hand to the mixing process, splicing in grittier tape recorded segments in order to maintain a certain tonal continuity with the band’s previous work, creating a rich structure of unconventional frictions, crystalline flashes of polish ripping through abysses of hissing low end only to shatter against the whipping sting of rusted chains moments later.
Lyrically, Hymns From The Hills extends both the cynicism and the defiant bravado of POISON RUIN’s established fantasy aesthetics. While the record continues POISON RUIN’S tradition of employing medieval-inflected fantasy imagery, Kennedy does not intend for these figures to be read as historically accurate. “I’m not very interested in conveying the historical facts of medieval culture. If we are to make sense of the present, we need to employ a more mythic mode of language and symbol to reach beyond the spiritual malaise that envelopes us. A mythic truth resonates within any time, but it’s echos call from outside of time. Medieval and fantasy imagery are simply effective personal starting points for tapping into that mode of communication.”
With Hymns From The Hills, POISON RUIN have accomplished a feat of creative labor which few have the courage to entertain, much less the capacity to execute so effectively. Hymns From The Hills ambitiously rewrites the very rules of what punk is capable of achieving, pushing POISON RUIN’s sound into expansive new terrains without sacrificing an ounce of the bleak symbolism and uncompromising aggression that first established them as an urgent new voice in the world of extreme music.
Dry Socket is a politically charged hardcore band from Portland, Oregon. With high-intensity performances and emotional songwriting, they blend classic hardcore aggression with deeply personal narratives. Their sound channels the urgency of acts like Punch, Paint it Black and Negative Approach, while carving out a distinctly modern and inclusive space within the genre.
Since forming Dry Socket has toured across the US, Europe and Mexico, sharing stages with bands such as Gorilla Biscuits, The Hope Conspiracy and Torso. Known for their visceral live shows, they create a space to be unapologetically angry.