There’s a kind of quiet violence in how music is consumed today: flattened into background noise, sonic perfume  fed into algorithms, sold as lifestyle. It’s entertainment as anesthesia. Sound without the weight. The Spiritual Sound, the new full-length from Los Angeles–based band Agriculture, stands as a pointed refusal of this condition. This is not a playlist. This is not a vibe. It is a demand.

Dan writes like someone clawing toward the divine through noise, channeling Zen Buddhism, historical collapse, ecstatic grief. Leah’s songs move differently: grounded in queer history and AIDS-era literature, amid the suffocating fog of the present, they carry the weight of survival as daily ritual. Her writing asks how to honor queer community and collective struggle without turning it into identity branding or personal mythmaking—how to stay honest, how to stay present. Though distinct, their voices converge in a singular spiritual grammar—one that defines the totality of The Spiritual Sound, not as separate parts, but as one unified expression.

Agriculture’s writing process is built on dismantling and revision of self. Dan and Leah bring songs to the band and then allow them to be pulled apart and rebuilt communally—reshaped through conflict, repetition, and deep trust. Richard adds guitar melodies and solos, and Kern constructs rhythms which are sometimes familiar but often unconventional. Finally, with Richard producing, the final form of each song is realized through intense collaborative work in the studio. Although a time consuming and ego-frustrating process, this allows the band to find the spirit of the songs not through inspiration, but through persistence.

Agriculture doesn’t offer salvation. The Spiritual Sound isn’t a map out of the fire. What it offers instead is presence—a confrontation with the moment, however unbearable, however divine. It insists that meaning is still possible, even in a world hell-bent on reducing everything to content, and where suffering itself can be conducive to recovery. As the Buddhist saying goes “the only way out is in.”