New York – Liturgy was a different sort of metal band from the start, when their debut album Renihilation came out in 2009. Renihilation sounded like a black metal album, with its witch’s howl screaming and torrential tremolo guitars and shotgun-blast drumming, but there was something else happening as well; it sounded transcendent, like someone lost in the desert seeing the face of God as they collapsed. Shortly after that, Liturgy’s leader Hunter Hunt-Hendrix published a manifesto called “Transcendental Black Metal” that presented in highly academic language an interpretation of black metal fueled by ecstasy rather than nihilism. This manifesto, combined with the fact that Liturgy was from Brooklyn and looked more like Pavement than like a black metal band, made them the most hated band in the genre…straight-up black metal heretics.
Liturgy expanded their sound on their follow-up and breakout album, 2011’s Aesthetica, which was less tethered to black metal than Renihilation. It contained tracks like the proggy riff relay race “Generation” and the medieval harpsichord workout “Helix Skull” alongside more straightforward black metal. In a turn of events that still seems unlikely, they toured with Diplo. But the hate they received after Aesthetica almost destroyed the band, with half of its members, including octopus-armed drummer Greg Fox, quitting shortly after its release.
There was a period in the wilderness, but now Fox and bassist Tyler Dusenbury are back, and Liturgy has returned with a new album, The Ark Work, which is so far from the black metal of Renihilation it may as well have been made by different band. It’s a truly weird album that defies comparison. The tremolo guitars and blast beats of black metal are just some of many wildly divergent elements that make up The Ark Work. Also present are vast quantities of mallet percussion, Quaker hymns, fucking bagpipes, and, according to a Pitchfork profile, hip-hop. Also string arrangements, electronic glitches, and almost no screaming. Hunt-Hendrix has replaced his howl with a sing-chant hinted at on previous records, but never used so extensively.
The album opens with “Fanfare,” which is exactly what it calls itself: a synthesized brass fanfare that announces the album’s arrival like a Roman emperor in a Technicolor epic. It climaxes on the third-to-last track “Reign Array,” an 11-minute song that’s paced like a miniature opera, and then immediately jumps into “Vitriol,” the most hip-hop song and the weirdest thing in Liturgy’s weird catalog. It kind of sounds like spooky Dirty South hip-hop, and Hunt-Hendrix almost-raps bizarre imagery like “soon cherubim will give birth to single parents.” It’s so audacious and strange that it’s beyond evaluating as “good” or “bad” or even “successful” or “unsuccessful.” If The Ark Work is Liturgy finally casting off their haters by eclipsing them, “Vitriol” is Liturgy testing the faithful who followed them there. I imagine “Vitriol” will be polarizing (for the record, I love it).
The aforementioned Pitchfork profile is essential reading for those who want to understand Liturgy. It explores some of Hunt-Hendrix’s heady philosophical underpinning, how Hunt-Hendrix and Fox have been friends since middle school, which is how they’re able to lock in to such nearly telepathic rhythmic unison, and how Fox was awed as a teenager by Lightning Bolt, whose drummer, Brian Chippendale, Fox plays like and coincidentally are releasing a new album the same day as Liturgy. If anything, the profile makes you root for these guys. They’re just trying to make transcendental music, that’s all.
Liturgy are touring the U.S. and Europe this spring and summer. The Ark Work is out now from Thrill Jockey.
Liam Mathews
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