The art of the red herring is a good reminder as to why you shouldn’t assume something of an album based off its promo cycle. Leading up to the release of their debut full-length, The Spiritual Sound, self-professed ecstatic black metalmakers Agriculture sounded like they were escaping that label by previewing the whole of the body with a series of expectantly intriguing yet nuanced listens that shifted away from the heavier material of their 2023 breakthrough debut album and the coupling of EPs that were last year’s Living Is Easy and 2023’s The Circle Chant. There was the Buddhist meditative ritual in patience “Bodhidharma” that experimented with restraint and silence as an adverse reaction to a world of noise. While objectively louder in its sound, “The Weight” let off the inner most of it through screamo extremism. “Dan’s Love Song” sees labelmates Midwife’s heaven metalgaze from our humble Earth and expands it further beyond to touch every particle of creation within the cosmos.

The opening half of The Spiritual Sound, all led by vocalist Leah B. Levinson, may elicit a double take because of this. At least it did on these pages’ end, going as far as to double-check that the album had been labeled correctly and wasn’t some other metal artist who may have also been named Agriculture or something like that because there’s audibly an energy spike in the very, very ecstatic black metal divine occurring throughout its opening trifecta. Opener “My Garden” is the hardest of the three — and possibly the entirety of the album — thrashing and shredding as the gods intended with skittering, abstract drum interstitials wedged in as uncanny valleys between the heavy metal mountains. “Flea” is melodious in its post-rock scale with sky-stretching guitars solos while “Micah (5:15am)” does a mile in millisecond with rapid-fire punk riffs and speed-demon drumming.

As the album gravitates toward a more centered black metal “Serenity”, it’s at this point in the listen where Agriculture embrace inner calm after achieving the highest level of consciousness through their ecstatic onslaught. Through Levinson’s energy counterpart and the band’s resident Buddhist, Dan Meyer, even the word “Hallelujah” takes on new meaning within the track’s bend on metallic folk. This is no longer the thing of black metal as derived from beautiful white noise and violent static with joy and Zen applied to the formula, but rather one transformed by the deconstruction of the self where Agriculture define the sound as their own spiritual identity.

Highlights: “My Garden”, “Dan’s Love Song”, “Bodhidharma”

Agriculture’s The Spiritual Sound is available now on The Flenser.

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