Daily Dose: Ceremony, "In the Spirit World Now"

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Legendary California punks Ceremony are prepping the release of their sixth album, August’s In the Spirit World Now. It’s the band’s first since their excellent 2015 offering, The L-Shaped Man, and we’ve already heard the album’s lead single, “Turn Away the Bad Thing.”

Today (July 17), the band shared the album’s title track. “In the Spirit World Now” adds newfound gloss to the band’s sonic palette. Spritely neon synths soar above a seedy bass groove, letting rhythmic guitars and game drums propel the track forward at a crunchy clip along a neo-noir highway.

Frontman Ross Farrar’s vocals uncannily glide over the track, witchy but cyberpunk, with sensual non-sequiturs like “Desire, oh it’ll never stop” peppered throughout. Here’s what Farrar has to say about the track:

The spirit world came about through the reading of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. The novel’s fictitious character, Von Humboldt Fleisher, writes a long letter to the protagonist, Charlie Citrine, which announces, We are not natural beings, but supernatural beings. I understood it as a moment of praise and ran away with it.

“In the Spirit World Now” comes paired with a Muted Windows-directed music video. Using inverted RGB color schemes, VHS-quality static effects and psychedelic editing effects, the video perfectly fits the track’s sonic aesthetics.

Daily Dose: Ceremony, “In the Spirit World Now”