MetalPost-rock
The Flenser · 2 October 2026
Seven of the ten tracks come from a single night, the main-stage set at Roadburn in Tilburg, where the Los Angeles quartet played “The Spiritual Sound” front to back last April. The other three were pulled in from elsewhere — “Flea” (3:56) in Glasgow, “Micah (5:15am)” (4:04) in Milan and “Bodhidharma” (6:23) in Cologne — and each one carries its own recording engineer: Lewis Ferguson, Lorenzo Raimondi and Timothy Schulz, with Freek De Greef handling Tilburg. Richard Chowenhill, the band’s second guitarist, mixed and mastered the lot.
It runs 43:49 and the running order isn’t that night’s. “My Garden” (5:27) opens and “Serenity” (3:30) closes, both from Tilburg, but the out-of-town tracks slot in at positions 2, 3 and 7. The oddest entry is the fifth: “The Spiritual Sound”, which gives both the studio album and this live record their title, lasts eight seconds and runs straight into “Dan’s Love Song” (4:43).
The band bills itself as an “ecstatic black metal band from Los Angeles, inspired by the glory of the ocean”. The tools are standard issue for the genre: tremolo, blast beats and two voices, Dan Meyer’s and bassist Leah B. Levinson’s. “Hallelujah” (2:57) leaves her most exposed out front, and “The Reply” (6:52) gives the two guitars the most room, with Kern Haug on drums.
Stitching four rooms together has a cost: the record never quite plays as one night. The three outside recordings arrive with a different acoustic and a different crowd, and the join shows most between “Flea” and “Micah (5:15am)”, which run back to back and come from different cities. At Tilburg the band had been moved up to the festival’s biggest room because of ticket demand, and reviews from that day already said the space did not suit them.
Vinyl and CD follow on 27 November. They spend the autumn in the United States with Uniform and Pure Hex, from 29 October to 24 November, and in 2027 they return to Europe opening for Alcest, from 12 March to 10 April: the last two dates are in Portugal — Lisbon on the 9th and Porto on the 10th — and none is in Spain.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Roger Estivill