Sowing in the Storm with "Ecstatic Black Metal" Band Agriculture

The record opens with clanking bass strokes before a dizzying hornet’s nest of guitars and drums careens around maniacally for 20 seconds. After that, a brutal downtuned riff kicks in, accompanied by face-melting shredding. By the time the song hits the one-minute mark, and vocalist/bassist Leah B. Levinson’s dungeon-creature scream rips across the track, there have been three distinct movements. There are four more minutes, and a few more movements, to go—including a beautiful melodic reprieve that’s reprised near the song’s final moments.

It’s a thrilling shot across the bow from one of heavy music’s most fearless acts. By the end of The Spiritual Sound, Agriculture have extended their tongue-in-cheek genre designation of “ecstatic black metal” into regions like powerviolence, noise, alternative, shoegaze, and sounds that touch on folk and traditional. “Dan’s Love Song,” for example, with its nostalgic melody and simple chord progressions, could be a noise-rock interpretation of some obscure 1800s ballad. (The band lists Metallica, Slipknot, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and Bob Dylan as primary influences on the new album.) “Bodhidharma,” meanwhile, flips on its heel between headbanging metal and passages of silence, punctuated by screams, whispers, and Haug’s frozen, hulking snare and kick bursts. It also features some of Chowenhill’s most mindboggling lead guitar passages.

“The problem that I was trying to solve with my songwriting on this record was, ‘How do I write about things as they occur in my life without overly dramatizing them?’” —Leah B. Levinson

Formed in the early days of the pandemic, Agriculture—Levinson, Meyer, guitarist Richard Chowenhill, and drummer Kern Haug—have defined their sound as something that is once experimental, abrasive, and jubilant. The record title and the band’s self-determined genre designation hail from a jokey remark lobbed at them: “I love the spiritual sound of this ecstatic black metal.” The phrase, and the band, are the subject of debate on various heavy-music forums. There is a certain sense of Ursula K. Le Guin’s world-building at play in Agriculture’s music—a playfulness, curiosity, and seeming inhabitance of an alternate reality.