Agriculture: “As artists, we’re interested in finding the profound and the divine in everyday life”

Los Angeles is not the obvious breeding ground for a band on the very cutting edge of extreme music, built on showbiz convention and hackneyed tales of underdog strife or broken dreams. Agriculture sit apart from all that. They see the old City Of Angels simply as ‘home’. Avant-garde black metal might take listeners to unearthly places, but it can be rooted in the common and ordinary.

“We’re a heavy band full of artists interested in looking for the profound – even the divine – in everyday life,” explains guitarist and vocalist Daniel Meyer. “Our thesis, our battlecry, is that the normal experiences of just being alive can be truly intense. It can be ‘metal’ just to exist as a human being. Our music is about taking a genre that’s traditionally grounded in fantasy and applying it to what life is really like. It’s possible to find the fantastic there, too.”

Fellow guitarist Richard Chowenhill smiles. “Most days I’ll wake up and head to the studio. In LA that means a lot of time sitting in traffic. But even as I’m sitting in traffic, beautiful things will often happen. I’ll catch the sun in a certain way, or see some new mural or piece of graffiti I’ve never seen before. It could even just be watching a leaf falling in the breeze.”

“Saying you’re an ‘LA band’ is funny,” Dan picks up. “It’s not a regional thing. LA is just a hub. It’s full of musicians, from people putting on DIY noise shows to superstars playing in arenas. Like, have you ever seen a popstar who’s not popular? It’s amazing!”

“I saw someone who had been on reality TV play a show recently,” adds drummer Kern Haug. “She had this incredible production, and lasers that shot out of her bra. But there were 20 people there. In Hollywood, there are shows like that every week!”

“Even our practice space is a very LA thing,” continues bassist and vocalist Leah Levinson. “It’s a place with at least 60 rooms, with a parking lot that’s always full of all different kinds of musicians carrying gear, and conversations between people creating different things.”

“There’s a liberation in that,” Dan stresses. “People complain all the time that LA is ‘fake’, but the other side of that is that you can be whatever you want. There is zero judgement. Do you remember that scene with Dodgson in the restaurant from the start of Jurassic Park? Where the guy he’s eating with starts shouting out his name. It’s like that. ‘No-one cares!’”

Five-thousand miles east of Los Angeles this afternoon, Agriculture are blending in to a different kind of background noise. Bunched around a table, sipping soup, tea and beer in a packed traditional pub on Glasgow’s notorious Maryhill Road, the quartet get the odd sideways glance but most of the interest is on the football playing out on TV. They’re in town for core., the city’s showcase for all things loud and esoteric, but our conversation is geared more towards the imminent release of second LP The Spiritual Sound.

“Trying to define spirituality is impossible, like trying to describe God,” Dan says. “The best way to know when someone is bullshitting religiously is when they know what they think God is. But you can describe how it relates to your life.

“A lot of this ‘spirituality’ has to do with what it’s like to write music as an adult. When you’re young, you have access to a very raw emotional passion about things like love and sex and experiencing loss and heartbreak for the first time. You just don’t feel those things in your 30s. But being married and having a dog and teaching music has its own kind of intensity, too. It’s the difference between looking at a campfire and an uncontrolled forest fire.”

Leah agrees. “The way I think about that is using music to access and express things that otherwise cannot be expressed. In that sense, I can’t really tell you what this music is saying. The really spiritual experience is following through our ideas and pushing that boldness and experimentation. Something might seem wrong on paper, but be right for us.

“I saw a comment on the video for The Weight that said something like, ‘This song is intense. This is how it feels to be alive…’ That’s what I was hoping for. That song is driven by violence and struggle but it lands in a space of connection and [ultimate peace]. I’m very interested in music that uses extremity to meet me in the intensity of where I’m at and take me out of it.”

Indeed, Agriculture’s compositions are complex and tangled, built of intertwined ideas, but it's all the stronger for it. Trying to simplify The Spiritual Sound, listeners might see it as an album of binaries. Dan and Leah share lyrical duties and although both say they’d be surprised if their bandmates knew what they were singing about, the difference is tangible. Dan’s timeless, internalised topics (Zen Buddhism, historical collapse, ecstatic grief) clash with Leah’s more contemporary sociopolitical concerns (queer history, AIDS-era literature, the collapse of civil rights in the United States) but they consolidate into a singular voice.

Likewise, the actual sound of the record utilises the contrast between light and dark, loud and quiet to balance a coherently-finished sonic canvas. Outstanding recent single Bodhidharma – a song that took two years to complete, named after the 5th century monk who popularised Zen Buddhism – lurches between towering walls of sound and passages of fragile, fractured near-silence. Even the broader album can be conceptually split between its incandescently breathless Side A and the engrossing, more subtle ‘devotion’ of Side B.

“My favourite albums growing up were records like that – like The Beatles’ Abbey Road,” Dan explains, pausing to self-consciously liken himself to Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel explaining how Lick My Love Pump was influenced by Mozart and Bach. “What is Octopus’ Garden doing there?! Or [Deerhunter classic] Halcyon Digest. Even Metallica’s Ride The Lightning has Trapped Under Ice – my favourite thrash song – next to a number as dark as Fade To Black.”

“When I listen to Flea, the second song on The Spiritual Sound, it feels like ‘sword and sorcery metal’,” laughs Leah. “I hear it as a ‘castle song’, which is a massive contrast with lyrics which are very much of the current moment. Then Richard’s guitar solo comes in, and it’s the sleaziest, most Sunset Strip rock’n’roll solo that you could imagine. I’m still confused by it all!”

“It’s about the formal logic of juxtaposition or adjacency rather than a Lego-like understanding of how things fit together,” Dan adds. “It’s like seeing a tractor next to a BMW. It’s interesting. I guess I wrote the tractor songs on this record…”

Leah grins, “And I stole the BMW!”

Situating where their band – and this album sits – is a fascinating conversation. Richard suggests that the experimental intent and split in songwriting duties will resonate with fans of David Gilmour songs and Roger Waters’ competing tracks on Pink Floyd’s classic The Dark Side Of The Moon. Leah suggests, with tongue partially in cheek, that the binaries on the record could be likened to the contrasts between Slipknot and Kittie in the nu-metal revival.

Tellingly, Kern remarks that they listen to “as much as 30 per cent” metal together in the van. The influence of American forbears like Deafheaven and Liturgy is undeniable, and they reel off a litany of obvious peers from YHWH Nailgun, Chat Pile and more. But then the conversation veers down countless unexpected avenues, from Dan’s observation that “the monkey guy” (Robbie Williams) is massive in Europe but not at all in the United States, to a final reflection on one of his guitar students love of Phoebe Bridgers and the enduring appeal of indie icons Bright Eyes.

“We played last year on the night of the U.S. presidential election with Chat Pile,” Dan remembers. “That night sucked. It was so shitty. But what we were doing felt like one of the only appropriate responses. The last song on the new record is called The Reply which is about a letter written by [legendary composer] Leonard Bernstein after the assassination of JFK. It was about how the only thing that artists can do to respond to dark times is to make music more passionately and more beautifully than we ever have before. That’s not to say that what we’re doing is important ‘in a big way’ but it is good to make people feel better.”

“The goal is to connect with as many people as possible and to provide them a safe space,” adds Richard. “A safe headspace. When I was young and dealing with anxiety, metal was the only thing that I could listen to to make that better. It was all I could listen to to help me sleep. I listened to Children Of Bodom’s Hate Crew Deathroll every night. If there’s a way that our music – the lyrics or the sound – can help people living through difficult political times, difficult personal times or difficult economic times, it’s such an important thing.”

In terms of reaching those people most in need of hearing their music – and of continuing to challenge themselves to find new profundity in the everyday – it’s about going beyond the boundaries of where their music sits and see what happens next.

“We love to play at festivals like Roadburn or core., but one of the things that has been most fun in this band has been that experience of winning over new audiences,” Dan enthuses. “At the beginning of the band it felt like a challenge where we would get up in front of a ‘normal’ metal crowd, like at Metal Injection Fest 2023 with bands like Testament, and Machine Head in Orange County – one of the more conservative parts of America. But we got up there and did our thing.”

“The place where I feel comfortable is in the hearts of individuals,” Richard chips in. “I think we have historically appealed to people who have felt rejected or not welcomed by other scenes. It’s about connecting with people on an individual level and hearing their stories.”

“We played at Nudes Craft & Cocktails in Cork, Ireland the other night,” gestures Leah. “It had a very DIY vibe, with most of our sound coming from the amps. There was no room anywhere. And a bunch of kids in battle jackets and corpse paint had travelled all the way down from Limerick to see us. They were just so stoked. That was the most ‘comfortable’ I’ve felt playing an Agriculture set in a while. That kind of show feels like home base. We’re looking into the eyes of people who’re [buzzed] about our music, playing for them and ourselves.”

“It’s just so fun to be playing to those kinds of super-excited kids!” Kern agrees.

“Plus, we have a lot of moms who’ve started coming to our shows,” Dan signs off. “They bring their kids and then somehow get into our band. I mean, we’re too old to be triggering maternal instinct. And I don’t think we’re hot enough to be triggering anything else. But if we’ve got the mom demographic on lock, it feels like the world is there for the taking!”

The Spiritual Sound is released on October 3 via The Flenser

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