Photo by Olivia Crumm

Rarely do press releases introducing a band’s new album and / or single stop these pages dead in their tracks, but the one announcing Agriculture’s sophomore effort, The Spiritual Sound, alongside its lead single “Bodhidharma” did just that. It reads:

There’s a kind of quiet violence in how music is consumed today — flattened into background noise, sonic perfume fed into algorithms, sold as lifestyle. It’s entertainment as anesthesia. Sound without the weight. The Spiritual Sound, the new full-length from Los Angeles–based band Agriculture, stands as a pointed refusal of this condition. This is not a playlist. This is not a vibe. It is a demand.

If you’ve been following these page’s socials, then you already know that that weight of too much new music being fed down the pipeline in mass only to be forgotten just as fast, and the normalization of that has, become a big point of contention here in trying to appreciate music deemed more than just a momentary distraction. The focus needs to be on the listens that stand out not only as something to be recommended, but art that will build a space in your head which can be lived with and pondered well beyond the timeline’s attention deficit shelf life.

“Bodhidharma” is a loud extension of what the Los Angeles experimental black metal band more explicitly began exploring on last year’s outstanding extended play, Living is Easy, in all of its noisy Zen. Buddhist life lessons again are its center — in this case, the story of Zen Buddha founder and Indian monk Bodhidharma’s 9-year meditative challenge of staring at a cave wall as an extreme act of patience. We, too, are put into a sliver of that space across the six-and-half-minute-listen. The listen quakes in big riffs rapturously before striking us with near-silence beyond the deafening screams and spoken word whispers of Leah Levinson. “Feels like you’re gonna hurt forever,” she observes. Just when it feels like you are bound to break, electricity rips back an intensity that satiates your head with fire. Let this all be a lesson: the wait is part of what makes the reward so redeeming.

Lyric video by: Jimmy Whispers

Footage courtesy of: Jaque Rabie’s Yokoji: Life at an American Zen Center

Agriculture’s The Spiritual Sound will be released October 3rd on The Flenser.