Ceremony

Ceremony began in Rohnert Park, a city in Sonoma County in Northern California, and named their third album after it. That 2010 record marked a turning point in the story of a band already remarkable for refusing to stay still. Their first two full-lengths, Violence Violence in 2006 and Still Nothing Moves You in 2008, arrived from the hardcore and powerviolence underground, records that burned with concentrated intensity and found an eager audience in the California punk scene.

Rohnert Park showed the other side of what Ceremony was capable of: more expansive, more willing to let ideas breathe, without sacrificing the energy that had defined the earlier work. Zoo, released in 2012, pushed further still, drawing from garage rock and new wave alongside the band's punk roots and becoming a record that caught even longtime listeners off guard. By The L-Shaped Man in 2015, produced by John Reis, the band had arrived somewhere leaner and more interior, closer in spirit to post-punk's original impulses. In the Spirit World Now came next in 2019, and again the band pressed forward rather than consolidating.

The lineup at the center of that evolution consists of vocalist Ross Farrar, guitarists Anthony Anzaldo and Andy Nelson, bassist Jasmine Watson, and drummer Jake Casarotti. Farrar's voice is the band's most chameleonic instrument, capable of the physical intensity that hardcore demands and the quieter expressiveness that post-punk invites. The musicians around him have always matched that range, shifting textures and tempos with the assurance of people who trust their instincts entirely.

Tell Me Your Dream, Ceremony's seventh studio album, arrives August 7 via Relapse Records. It is their first record in seven years, and it reunites them with producer John Reis, the same collaborator who helped shape The L-Shaped Man. The album's lead singles announce its intentions clearly. "Death Destruction Mayhem" arrives with the propulsive urgency Ceremony has summoned throughout their career, guitar-forward and relentless in the best sense. "Dark Summer" finds a different angle, inhabiting the disorientation that appears when dread settles in during brilliant sunshine. The full tracklist includes "Other Hells," "Madness," "Antenna," and "Paradise," suggesting an album that covers considerable emotional ground across its ten songs.

The reach of the band's catalog comes through in any cross-section of their work. "Into the Wayside, Pt. 1 / Sick," from the Rohnert Park album, carries the raw momentum of those early years in the California punk underground. "Hysteria," from Zoo, shows the more expansive, rhythmically complex direction the band pursued as they moved through the 2010s. Tell Me Your Dream draws on all of that accumulated experience and channels it into something that sounds unmistakably like the present tense.

Ceremony has never been a band content to repeat themselves. Seven years between albums has not changed that. Tell Me Your Dream arrives not as a comeback but as a continuation, proof that the restless instinct driving the band since Violence Violence in 2006 remains fully alive and still finding new directions to pursue.