One of LA’s fastest rising and heaviest bands, Agriculture, have shared their upcoming album’s first single, “Bodhidharma.” Dan Meyer says of the track: “Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, was an Indian monk who famously stared at the wall of a cave for nine years. He even cut off his eyelids in order to prevent himself from falling asleep. At one time, another monk approached him in his cave and pleaded ‘master, my head is on fire with anxiety, can you pacify my mind?’ Bodhidharma just kept staring at the wall and Huike waited outside of the cave all night until he was buried in snow up to his waist. Finally, as a gesture of desperation he cut off his arm and offered it to the great master. Huike later became Bodhidharma’s successor.’”
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.
Across its runtime, The Spiritual Sound traces a narrative arc through extremes and the album is largely a fusing of the visions of its two principal songwriters: Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson—distinct voices, deeply complementary. 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. 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 formation mirrors their duality. What began as a loose collaboration between Kern Haug and Dan Meyer in the Los Angeles noise scene evolved into a shared pursuit of the sublime through heavy music. With the additions of Richard Chowenhill and Leah Levinson, the project solidified into the band’s current form. The ecstatic black metal foundation that was laid on 2022’s The Circle Chant expanded into something more precise and far-reaching on their 2023 self-titled full-length, and deepened further with 2024’s Living Is Easy: a record that embraced devotional intensity and radiant heaviness in equal measure.
