- Relapse
- 2026
When you see Ceremony live, they take you on a ride. At this point, Ceremony are a punk institution, but the word "institution" implies a certain level of stasis. Ceremony keep changing. When the band started in 2004, all of its members were teenagers. Most of them were in high school when they wrote and recorded "Kersed," a perfectly concise 72-second anthem of disgust that became a canonical hardcore work. Live, Ceremony still play "Kersed" and the other fast, hard, chaotic head-choppers that they recorded in their early days, when they might've been second only to Trash Talk in their ability to turn a crowded room into a seething whirlwind of flying limbs. But they also play their more recent material — itchy-throbby post-punk atmospheric enough to remind you that they named themselves after a New Order song in the first place.
Powerviolence bands generally don't make new wave, and new wave bands generally don't make powerviolence. Ceremony are both, and they're neither. It's not that strange to see former hardcore kids branching out and trying out different modes and genres, but those people generally don't keep doing that within the context of the band that they started when they were children. Ceremony's membership hasn't changed since 2011, when former Paint It Black guitarist Andy Nelson came aboard. They're outliers because they stayed together and because they never disowned their younger selves, which is how you put together a live show that swings wildly from pile-on singalongs to icy mood-piece excursions and back again. It's also how you get an album like Tell Me Your Dream.
The members of Ceremony aren't the same people who started the band more than 20 years ago. They're adults now. After starting out in Rohnert Park, the suburban Bay Area town that gave their 2010 masterpiece its title, I think they're all based in LA. They've got other interests, other things going on. Since the release of the last Ceremony album, 2019's In The Spirit World, singer Ross Farrar has put out three solo LPs, and guitarist Anthony Anzaldo has released two, including a full-length cover of Prince's Dirty Mind. Farrar and drummer Jake Casarotti have made a handful of truly excellent records of clanging Dischord-style post-hardcore with their other band Spice. And Ceremony as a whole have looked back a bit. They randomly decided to celebrate the 14th anniversary of Rohnert Park by playing the LP in full for one night only, and they sold out the Hollywood Palladium. It looked awesome. The live-album version came out a few months ago.
Tell Me Your Dream, the first new Ceremony album in seven years, is the sound of Ceremony taking in their own history and reinterpreting it. In some ways, it sounds like the band's live shows, fiery and mantra-like punk anthems sitting side-by-side with genre experiments that sometimes take on their own anthemic force. Even though the album never sits still, all the songs are recognizably the work of the same band, one with the gravitas to be urgent and elliptical at the same time. Some of the hardest songs have unexpected touches, like the new-wave synth-wobble on the otherwise feral "Other Hells." Some of the off-kilter tracks — like the spidery-funky "Madness," which immediately follows "Other Hells" and sounds like Ceremony's attempt at !!!-style call-and-response dance-punk — still burn like a fever.
The last Ceremony album was a few years and side-project records ago, but the band never stopped playing live, and the energy of their sets comes through clearly on Tell Me Your Dream. The album marks a reunion with a past collaborator who has been in the game even longer than Ceremony: John Reis, of Pitchfork (band, not website), Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From The Crypt, Hot Snakes, and who even knows how many other projects. Back in 2015, Reis produced The L-Shaped Man, the album where Ceremony truly leapt into the Joy Divison-style sparkle-mope sound that had previously just haunted the edges of their records. Reis plays some extra guitar on the Devo-cranked Tell Me Your Dream thrasher "Deep Down Where I Belong," and he sings backup throughout, along with Tørsö bassist and past Ceremony touring member Jasmine Watson. I like to think that Reis has something to do with the rock 'n' roll swagger that comes through on a track like the longing, bittersweet groove "Dark Summer."
When he's not singing for Ceremony or his other projects, Ross Farrar is a big-deal poet who did post-grad work at Syracuse, which means that he taught in the same English department as George Saunders. (I was an English major at Syracuse, but my time there was a million years ago, my path and Farrar's never crossed.) On Tell Me Your Dream, Farrar mostly isn't writing the ultra-direct kinds of lyrics he once did, the ones you might want tattooed on you. Instead, his writing is insular and sometimes impenetrable. A song like "Madness" might be full of cultural references deep enough that I had to look them up, but it can all lead up to a moment of insight that can leave your head swimming — in this case, "Being young's like being rich/ You have this thing that everyone wants, and you couldn't care less... And you waste it." Later, on the spartan art-pop track "10 Planets," Farrar barks, "When everything is lost, you’re gonna find that you can’t eat that money." So forget what I said; maybe you would want that one tattooed on you.
On the grand spectrum of Ceremony records, Tell Me Your Dream is probably closer to the indie rock of the band's recent past than the all-out hardcore attacks of their early days. But even more than before, the Ceremony of Tell Me Your Dream sound like they're in touch with every iteration of the band, including the ones that haven't arrived yet. When Ceremony branch out in different directions, they don't sound like they're playing genre pastiche or keeping themselves from getting bored. Instead, the album stands as one more chapter of their endless quest for expression. Ceremony never stop searching, and their continued fearless existence feels like more of a miracle with every passing year.
If Tell Me Your Dream is the last album that Ceremony ever make, it's a great way to go out. If it's your first Ceremony record, then it's a great place to start, though you should probably proceed directly to Rohnert Park next. But maybe the best way to hear the album is as one more piece of this beautiful legacy that they've been building for decades. Their records all exist in conversation with one another, and one this strong, this late in the game, makes the conversation even richer.
Tell Me Your Dream is out 8/7 on Relapse.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Man/Woman/Chainsaw's Cannonball
• The Mountain Goats' Days
• FLO's Therapy At The Club
• Ravyn Lenae's Blue Island
• Public Opinion's The Curse Of Public Opinion
• Citizen's Halcyon Blues
• Overmono's Pure Devotion
• Hana Stretton’s tiarn
• Margaret Glaspy's I Am Both
• DMA’S' DMA’S
• Inspectah Deck's Dragon's Breath
• John Carpenter's Cathedral
• Karol G's No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto
• Slow Fiction's dollhouse
• God Of War's Molly Picture
• Electric Callboy's TANZNEID
• Coupdekat's Goodbye 2012!
• Really Good Time's Affirmations
• The Lampreys' Masquerade
• Megasound's Megasound
• Why Bother?'s Beyond Step One
• Art Feynman's Orphans
• Hulder's Verbolgen
• Cimarron 615's Same Sky
• Stay Out's Broken Homes
• Martha Skye Murphy & Roy Montgomery's Nebular
• The Iron Roses' Molotov Nights
• Marlon Hoffstadt's Das Ist Daddy
• Nezza's Sweat
• Derez De'Shon's I'm Not OK But…
• Bull Thieves' Rattlesnake And Swan
• Jason Calhoun's revelations of divine love
• KIASMOS' II Reworked
• Wealthy Women's Children
• Sunken Cages' Neram Pularumbol (As The Dawn Breaks)
• Jutes' Chin Up, Beautiful
• Rowena Wise's Bad Things Feel Good*
• Blums' Sunk Cost Fantasy
• Neptune's Core's Pivot
• Nepunian Maximalism's Nāgabhūtaṃ
• Din Of Celestial Birds' Takeoffs & Landings
• Xandria's Eclipse
• Billy Morrison's Hollow
• Arun Sood & Angeline Morrison's Donn/Dubh
• Somi's What Does It Take To Bloom?
• Maya Ongaku's Nothing Space Music
• The Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker, & The Recording Arts Orchestra Of Los Angeles' John Williams Legacy
• Solon Holt's Songs About You
• Crazy Clue's Where The Dregs Dwell
• Team Work's Somebody's Gotta Do It
• Dinner Party's Watchu Bringing?
• Houston Grand Opera's Breaking The Waves
• Cletus Strap's rappers suck.
• Stray Kids' This & That
• Role Model's Chuck Timely & The Hourglass
• The compilation Sittin' With Blaze: A Tribute To Blaze Foley
• The compilation Morgan Freeman’s Symphonic Blues Experience
• The compilation Fully Nowhere: A World Resources Archive
• Hollywood Vampires' At Montreux Jazz Festival live album
• Militarie Gun's God Save The Gun (Deluxe)
• Uh Huh Her's Nocturnes: Redux
• Paul Carrack's The Country Side Of Paul Carrack (Volume Two)
• The Dresden Dolls' Yes, Virginia…(Tailor’s Version)
• Picheolin's 吉BOARD(Gilboard) mini album
• Ela Minus & Nick León's qué les pasó a mis amigos? EP
• Initiate's With Love // With Rage EP
• Nikki Nair's The Sick Dimension EP
• imy3 & towhead's imy3 & towhead Split EP
• Judy's Death Of A Ladies' Mutt EP
• Lonnie Gunn's 2013 horsemeat scandal EP
• Fana Hues' Catch N' Release EP
• Max Styler's I Don’t Think I Can Stop EP
• effe's Solder EP
• Sesame Girl's Butterfly Wing In A Silver Locket EP
• abracadabra's Peel Away EP
