Review: Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound

Style: Black metal, avant-garde metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Deafheaven, Slowdive, Sadness, Violet Cold
Country: United States
Release date: 3 October 2025

Once born of frostbitten forests and Satanic rites, black metal now blooms beneath the Los Angeles sun. This isn’t the second wave anymore: Agriculture call themselves an “ecstatic black metal band,” which could mean anything from divine transcendence to taking actual ecstasy. Their second full-length album The Spiritual Sound sets out to challenge the genre conventions of its black metal roots with an experimental, boundary-pushing embrace of the euphoric, the devotional, and the everyday.

My first few listens left me wondering whether The Spiritual Sound knew exactly what it wanted to be. The first half of the album unfolds as a claustrophobic black-metal wave—a blur of frizzled, low-fi guitars, tachycardic drums, and shrieking, snarling vocals. Despite its intensity, it’s less a series of songs than a single, writhing texture: tracks smear into each other, the sound coalescing into radiant noise. The guitars wheeze and whistle like a kettle coming to a boil in “The Weight”, while the aforementioned ecstasy bubbles to the surface through major-key constructions in tracks like “Flea”.

However, the haze clears on The Spiritual Sound’s back half: it’s softer, with clean vocals largely replacing the growls, and the songs take on much more defined, determinable shapes. Luckily, I didn’t have to puzzle over this for long: the record’s marked A-side/B-side juxtaposition is billed as intentional in a lengthy sort of manifesto on Agriculture’s Bandcamp page, described as an intentional way to give space to the differing songwriting styles of band members Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson. The former is credited with architecting the first half of the album, where we’re told he “claw[s] toward the divine through noise”, while the latter is responsible for the second half, where she seeks to hold up queer stories without being aggrandizing, grappling with the present while grounded in the past. It’s a cogent recontextualization of the stylistic shifts that initially rankled me as disjunction, and also quite possibly the most pretentious thing I’ve read this year. 

“Dan’s Love Song” serves as a porous threshold between the two worlds, drifting into the sort of soft-focus shoegaze that could pass for Slowdive on a sunny day. From there, shapes emerge: the faltering, breathless vocals of “Bodhidharma,” the rambunctious guitar solo of the same track. Not every experiment lands—the indie-leaning “Hallelujah” turns grating as Meyer whinily omits the vowels in words like “water”. I take this last example as a deliberate choice rather than a skill issue, since the clean vocals deployed elsewhere on the album are delicate but strong-boned. For example, closing track “The Reply” captures a rapturous moment by the edge of the ocean, building up from a tender duo of clean vocals and warm guitar into a thickly harmonized supernova of sound climaxing in a single, jagged harsh vocal line that feels both urgent and exultant.

In spite of the heft and significance of infusing Agriculture’s compositional process with spirituality, queerness, and transcendence, The Spiritual Sound relies too much on its liner notes to do the heavy lifting. If I need to read a mission statement to grasp the album’s purpose, some of that purpose is lost in translation. The best moments hint at integration, as in opener “My Garden”, where heavy and soft passages coexist without explanation. Further exploring the complementary potential of these two visions would help the album feel more like a cohesive whole and less like they decided to switch genres halfway through.

“This is not a playlist. This is not a vibe. It is a demand”, Agriculture write on their Bandcamp page. The Spiritual Sound is an album that asks for presence, not passivity. It may not reward these demands at every turn, with lofty intentions that sometimes outpace its cohesion. But Agriculture’s reverential reach towards enlightenment offers plenty to contemplate along the way.

Recommended tracks: Flea, Dan’s Love Song, Bodhidharma
You may also like: Liturgy, Botanist, Together to the Stars
Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: The Flenser

Agriculture is:
– Dan Meyer (guitar, vocals)
– Leah Levinson (bass, vocals)
– Richard Chowenhill (guitar)
– Kern Haug (drums)
With guests:
– Emma Ruth Rundle (vocals)