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.
Across its runtime, The Spiritual Sound traces a narrative arc through extremes: searing, sky-cracking catharsis on side A; a slow-burning, devotional undercurrent on side B. The album is largely a fusing of the visions of its two principal songwriters, Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson: distinct voices, deeply complementary.
Dan writes like someone clawing toward the divine through noise, channeling Zen Buddhism, historical collapse, ecstatic grief. Leah’s songs move differently: grounded in queer history and AIDS-era literature, amid the suffocating fog of the present, they carry the weight of survival as daily ritual. Her writing asks how to honor queer community and collective struggle without turning it into identity branding or personal mythmaking: how to stay honest, how to stay present. Though distinct, their voices converge in a singular spiritual grammar—one that defines the totality of The Spiritual Sound, not as separate parts, but as one unified expression.
Agriculture’s formation mirrors this duality. What began as a loose collaboration between Kern Haug and Dan Meyer in the Los Angeles noise scene evolved into a shared pursuit of the sublime through heavy music. With the additions of Richard Chowenhill and Leah Levinson, the project solidified into the band’s current form. The ecstatic black metal foundation was laid on 2022’s The Circle Chant, expanded into something more precise and far-reaching on their 2023 self-titled full-length, and deepened further with 2024’s Living Is Easy: a record that embraced devotional intensity and radiant heaviness in equal measure.
Agriculture’s writing process is built on dismantling and revision of self. Dan and Leah bring songs to the band and then allow them to be pulled apart and rebuilt communally: reshaped through conflict, repetition, and deep trust. Richard adds guitar melodies and solos, and Kern constructs rhythms which are sometimes familiar but often unconventional. Finally, with Richard producing, the final form of each song is realized through intense collaborative work in the studio. Although a time consuming and ego-frustrating process, this allows the band to find the spirit of the songs not through inspiration, but through persistence.
Yet, even in its most ambitious moments, The Spiritual Sound remains rooted in the ordinary and in the day-to-day relationships between the people who made it. Gas station snacks. Inside jokes. Sleeping on floors. Playing shows in rooms that smell like mildew. The spirit here isn’t abstract, it's live. This is spiritual music that starts with imperfect gear and a long-in-the-tooth tour van.
Agriculture doesn’t offer salvation. The Spiritual Sound isn’t a map out of the fire. What it offers instead is presence: a confrontation with the moment, however unbearable, however divine. It insists that meaning is still possible, even in a world hell-bent on reducing everything to content, and where suffering itself can be conducive to recovery. As the Buddhist saying goes “the only way out is in.”
When the founder of Chinese Zen, Bodhidharma, was asked by the emperor of China “What is the true meaning of the holy truth?” He replied, “Vast emptiness. Nothing holy.” This is not background music. This is not for vibe.
