Poison Ruin Deliver “Hymns From The Hills” On New Album

Poison Ruin’s Hymns from the Hills ambitiously rewrites the very rules of what punk is capable of achieving, pushing their sound into expansive new terrains without sacrificing an ounce of the bleak symbolism and uncompromising aggression. The Philadelphia punks have expanded their signature approach to grim mythmaking and scythe-swinging aggression in bold new directions, offering up a new body of songs that strike one as equal parts natural, undeniably of this world, and phantasmal. On Hymns from the Hills, Poison Ruin’s previous stories of toil and dispossession are revealed to be but one chapter etched upon a bleaker tapestry. One populated by spirits traversing sunless deserts and wilted hillsides, demonic torture objects limning the edges of the psyche, bodies transfigured into Luciferian snakes, Sadean prisoners bound to the screaming silence of abandoned castle towers.

The record is at once a forceful restatement of Poison Ruin‘s trademark sound and a departure from it. The crackling, cassette-dubbed darkness and crushing rhythms listeners have become accustomed to are buttressed by a carefully sculpted mosaic of new textures, from flourishes of Killing Joke hacksaw primitivism and blast-beats worthy of the Relapse Records catalogue number to crisp analog synth lines and ambient serenades reminiscent of Scott Walker and Durutti Column. Like a serpent moving ever outward with spiraling circularity, Hymns from the Hills expands Poison Ruin‘s sonic landscape in imaginative new directions while maintaining its center of gravity firmly in the band’s already established mythos.