For more than two decades, California's Ceremony have been leading lights in the global punk rock underground. They've continued to evolve sonically, from the frantic powerviolence of their early days to the New Order-style post-punk of 2019's In The Spirit World Now, but all that works exists within the same continuum. If you go see Ceremony live, they usually play song from all across that career, putting a varied discography on full display. Today, they're back with a new song that might mark the opening of a new chapter.
It's been about four years since Ceremony's last record, the two-song single "Vanity Spawned By Fear" b/w "California Poppy." But the band has stayed busy. Frontman Ross Farrar, for instance, has made excellent albums with his other band Spice and with his solo project RJF. Two years ago, Ceremony headlined the Hollywood Palladium, playing their 2010 classic Rohnert Park in full, and they just released a recording of that show as a live album. Over the past two weekends, Ceremony played Coachella. Today, they release the fearsome two-minute hardcore punk song "Other Hells."
"Other Hells" takes Ceremony back to the fast, direct hardcore of their earlier days without sounding quite like it would've belonged on Rohnert Park. I hear a lot of early-'80s UK punk on the song, but there's also some cool synth action that wouldn't have been out of place on Ceremony's recent records. Here's what Farrar has to say about the song in a press release:
"Other Hells" started as a meditation on the dualistic arts and the interplay of opposing forces in our lives: awake/asleep, physical/spiritual, inhale/exhale. This is a constant theme in the work of Ceremony: beauty juxtaposed with the intensity of aggressive music, seeking to create a single, cohesive work through audible, visual, and structural elements. Amid the ongoing rise in politics that lean on tribalism and polarizing rhetoric in an attempt to divide, the song responds by aiming to unify, using punk's great liberatory force: the slam.
Check it out below.
"Other Hells" is out now on Relapse.
