Holy Sons: Puritan Themes

“It’s a luxury to be on your own,” confesses Emil Amos on Puritan Themes’ eponymous opening track – a loner lament with the kind acoustic wanderings and canyon-sized synths that melt the heart. The Grails co-founder hasn’t been “Waiting for that kick down on judgement day” as he claims on Puritan Themes. Where the Holy Sons canon is concerned, it’s largely been ignored for the best part of three decades. The rejection from wider circles, the greatest anomaly across all forms of artistic expression of our generation.

It’s this rejection that inspires much of Holy Sons’ latest opus. Retreating to Chicago from his North Carolina base to finish the record, setting up camp in Grails bandmate Anthony Pattera’s digs, Amos’ solace was taking breaks in Douglass Park where these brief moments of solitude helped shape what Puritan Themes would become.

Amos has been so far ahead of the game that it’s almost been to his detriment. The days of squeezing out the demons via a four track and a guitar, now seemingly watered down to an Instagram post where confessionalism has been commodified. But in this post-trash landscape, Amos continues to batten down the hatches – a loner legend who has taken the mantle from Lou Barlow.

Renegade Saint: In Conversation with Holy Sons’ Emil Amos

“When I heard Sebadoh III, my direction in life was basically decided,” said Amos during our recent interview. “I thought it was essentially the greatest record ever made by human beings, and I’m still not sure that anyone has even touched it.” The album was the key that unlocked the gates to Holy Sons’ Lost Decade series, where Amos still continues to illuminate the core principles of lo-fi. To open that accessibility of the same micro realities Barlow exposed through the Sebadoh lens, crystallising the different emotions we all experience each day.

Amos has accomplished this as fearlessly as anyone, and while Holy Sons’ later years have seen the project steeped in doom-based outlier balladry where – in the words of Kris Kristoffsen – he has been “driven towards the darkness by the devil in his veins”, the results have cut deeper than any songwriter on earth. On Raw & Disfigured where Amos claims to be “Running straight back into my doubts”, the same embers from his eponymous 2020 landmark stir on Puritan Themes.

Following Puritan Themes and Raw & Disfigured, Amos travels deeper into unforgiving terrains on Stand Up Straight Again. Off-kilter doom country seemingly conceived from a mine shaft, and it’s this perilous corridor that leads to Radio Séance. A greulling instrumental stitched together with samples and a crescendo that moves to the white lights, it’s a story through sound that is the flash point to Puritan Themes.

The blood from Radio Séance drips into Everything. A brutal collision of undergirded drones and word-based weaponry, with verses like, “Everything I needed to see I saw,” and “Attracting every impulse that broke my fragile mind”, it’s one of the most nihilistic snapshots in the Holy Sons oeuvre. A song written by someone running through the blast zone only to escape it and arrive at the precipice.

Which is ironic considering Edge of the Bay follows. A lush dreamscape that rolls over the horizon, it’s all melody and saccharine inspired by the glory of AM radio and life’s more innocent times. As Amos finishes the song with the line, “The past is just a pile that you accrue”, it’s one of the most beautifully untethered songs he’s written.

Track By Track: Verity Den’s Wet Glass

This brighter moment is only fleeting, as Chain Gang surpasses the subversive hearted Everything as Puritan Themes’ most malevolent passage. Acerbic songcraft that underlines the morbid realities of someone constantly being played (“Didn’t want to be victim to the next thing / So you fall victim to the next King”), it smashes into the chiming dreadscape that is Fully Burnt. That “crack in the dirt of a drought” leading Amos into the abyss where the realisation that life doesn’t reward you for humanity but in fact for being its slave. Alongside Chain Gang, both are high watermark underdog tales that are among Amos’ best.

The ultimate conclusion awaits on One Divining Rod – a slow grinding finale where Amos falls into the same trap set in the title song by yet another inexplicable King (“You tell me to walk this way, but it’s such a cruel mistake”). In a life where, indeed, “the loser always wins”, it’s this dark harmony that permeates all throughout Puritan Themes. An album that is equal parts unmoored and deeply narcotic, Amos finds inspiration from the darkest recesses of the soul. It’s the only place one can explore to maintain their true artistic relevance, and on Puritan Themes the mission hasn’t changed. And as long as Amos continues writing songs, it never will.

Puritan Themes is out now via Thrill Jockey. Purchase from Bandcamp.