POISON RUIN / HYMNS FROM THE HILLS (Swamp Green Vinyl)

POISON RUIN return with their highly anticipated sophomore LP, Hymns From the Hills. Building off the strengths of their existing oeuvre, the band has 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 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.