CULT OF DOM KELLER - Unholy Drum

"Unholy Drum" by Cult Of Dom Keller is not a comeback but the result of almost five years of slow transformations, detours, and experiments carried out well below the surface. More than a new chapter, it's the documentation of a mutation.

Since their beginnings in 2007, the band has operated as a kind of sonic alchemy, building disturbed psychedelic landscapes inside a sonic bunker made of feedback, reverb and post-apocalyptic visions (even more pronounced on the excellent "Goodbye To The Light" from 2016).

This work introduces something different. Not so much a sharp change as a sudden opening, as if a wall of their sonic universe had cracked, letting in new air. Much of this transformation stems from the collaboration with Angus Andrew, the mastermind behind Liars, brought in here not so much as a traditional producer but as a creative catalyst. Andrew seems to have encouraged the trio to completely dismantle their own songs: cutting them up, turning them inside out, letting them ferment until they almost started moving on their own. It's the kind of process in which structure stops being a starting point and instead becomes something that slowly emerges, like an organism taking shape in the dark. The result is a record that keeps its roots in the band's dark psych-noise rock, but lets a broader sensibility filter through the cracks: the songs don't always unfold as uncontrolled psychedelic explosions (one of the group's historical trademarks) but as unstable structures, where synths, guitars and drums seem to orbit around a magnetic center that keeps shifting position (the unpredictable "Disappear").

In part, this atmosphere also stems from the context in which the record was made. The years separating "Unholy Drum" from its predecessor have been marked by an increasingly unstable global reality, and that nervous energy seems to slowly seep into the music. It never emerges as a direct political statement, nor as an ideological manifesto. Rather, as a background fever.

Today the trio (Neil Marsden, Ryan DelGaudio and Alistair Burns) seem to move with newfound freedom. Some passages open up into more atmospheric spaces, others take on an almost ritualistic quality, while certain rhythmic structures really do function like the drum evoked in the title: a hypnotic beat, at times highly compelling. Yet the visionary core of Cult Of Dom Keller remains intact. Their songs continue to conjure crepuscular mental landscapes: emptied-out cities, radio signals cutting through toxic skies, identities dissolving into electronic static. The difference is that, this time, the sound feels more connected to the present. The abandonment of rigid roles within the band, the refusal of overly defined structures, the freedom to follow a sound wherever it leads, all of it contributes to the sense that any direction is hypothetically possible. And it's precisely this openness that makes "Unholy Drum" one of the strangest and most fascinating works in their discography. Not their peak, though.

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11/04/2026