Where the Virginia duo’s previous records fused rap, techno, and other aggressive forms, its new album lumbers into a terrifying new realm of noise.
Prison Religion are masters of agitation. The Virginia-based duo of Warren Jones and Parker Black has spent the last few years grinding established tropes of noise, rap, and dance music to shreds. Though they have occasionally flirted with established song structures, the most chilling moments in their catalog let their tracks spiral into chaotic collages of noisy abstractions and misshapen rhythms. Even when they stop screaming, their instrumentals are terrifying on their own.
Hard Industrial B.O.P., their new project on Lee Gamble’s UIQ label, pushes Prison Religion further into this uncharted territory, foregrounding the brittle noise and teeth-rattling sound design that has always been an unsettling undercurrent in their music. On some of the duo’s earliest work together, like 2016’s Cage W Mirrored Bars, their queasy reflections of hardcore and rap inhabited the same universe that spawned noise-pop experimenters Black Dresses and New York boundary-pushers like Kill Alters or Machine Girl. But Hard Industrial B.O.P. feels like the next step in an ongoing evolution of their sound, pushing them further into seasick noise and cochlea-shredding distortion.
From opener “Bite” it’s clear that they’re drifting into the outer realms of electronic experimentation. It begins with an unsettling synth drone that sounds like a snippet of a Tangerine Dream film score playing from a pay-phone receiver and only gets more menacing from there, piling on distorted mumbling, distant screaming, and piercing, atonal textures. Tracks like “Banshee, Pale Fire, Landing” lock into legible rhythms (and you might make out a lyric or two if you listen closely), but even these moments are overwhelming and strange, scuffed with bristly electronics and ominous drones. Aided in part by collagist producer S280F (aka Lilith Treglia), Black and Jones conjure up sounds gloomier and more hair-raising than much of their prior catalog. Hard Industrial B.O.P. offers little respite.
All this chaos is by design. Prison Religion have said that they imagine the record as a provocation akin to the hard bop that challenged the jazz of the 1950s. Their music demonstrates a conscious desire to upend established forms. While previous records attempted to bridge the disparate worlds of experimental rap, hardcore techno, and other aggressive forms, tracks like “Survival, Leave me alone” are pointedly more gnarled and crushing than anything they’ve released to date. Here, Prison Religion sound interested mainly in letting out all the negativity they’ve been holding in, without worrying about anything like a memorable melody. Something this horrifying is hard to forget anyway.
Jones and Black have occasionally approached their music—heavy as it is—with a sense of humor. They called a 2018 release O FUCC IM ON THE WRONG PLANET and named a song after Nibiru, a fictional planet that some conspiracy theorists believe is on a cataclysmic path to destroy Earth. But Hard Industrial B.O.P. is more straightforwardly grim, serious, and, consequently, impactful. They have said that they felt that they were duty-bound to make a record that reflected the tumultuous time in the world that birthed it. “In this era, how can we look to space?” they write, bemoaning the seemingly inescapable oppression inherent in modern life. In response, they simply scream, aiming a cosmic cry at an unfeeling universe.
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