Poison Ruin – Hymns From the Hills [Swamp Green]

POISON RUIN return with their highly anticipated sophomore LP, Hymns From the Hills. Building off the strengths of their existing oeuvre, the band has developed their signature approach to grim mythmaking and scythe-swinging aggression in bold new directions, offering up a new body of songs that strike one as equal parts natural, undeniably of this world, and phantasmal.

The band’s vision has grown substantially, pushing well past the tales of peasants and serfs that stood as allegories for contemporary alienation in their previous work: on this newest offering, Their previous stories of toil and dispossession are revealed to be but one chapter etched upon a bleaker tapestry, one populated by spirits traversing sunless deserts and wilted hillsides, demonic torture objects limning the edges of the psyche, bodies transfigured into Luciferian snakes, Sadean prisoners bound to the screaming silence of abandoned castle towers. The record is at once