Unholy Drum is the long-awaited sixth album from Nottingham band Cult Of Dom Keller – not a ‘return’, for they were never really gone, but the product of five years spent evolving. In collaboration with Angus Andrew of LIARS on production duties. The album which is out now is a more expansive and left-field art-rock sound shining through the cracks in the Cult’s dark psychedelic noise-rock.
Reflecting on the time leading up to ‘Unholy Drum’, CODK , now comprised of Neil Marsden (vocals/keys/synths), Ryan DelGaudio (vocals/guitar/synths) and Alistair Burns (drums) – write: “It’s been nearly five years since we slipped through a crack in the world – and couldn’t find the same exit twice. It was a time where bassists dissolved like mist. Where bodies glitched in ways that felt half-medical, half-mythic. Where everything stalled except the music. Ideas kept arriving. Fragments. Residue. Ghost scraps clinging to existence like unfinished dreams, waiting to become whole. But this time, we wanted to create something totally different.”
And then came LIARS’ Angus Andrew: not a producer in the traditional sense but “a kindred spirit who opened a door we didn’t even know we had locked.” Working with Angus on a LIARS remix of their 2021 ‘Run From The Gullskinna’ single, a new creative relationship was immediately forged and the Cult’s vault of ideas soon pried upon for Angus to dig his claws into: “Working with Angus brought a different angle of experimentation to the way we worked. Together, everything was dismantled and pushed further into the dark. Sound was dissected until it sprouted limbs. We went so deep inside the tracks that eventually it felt like the songs were waiting for us to catch up… And yet, there was liberation. A freedom in abandoning defined roles. In serving the song rather than the structure. In hearing an idea suddenly explode into life through, say, the force of a full orchestra. It felt like any sound in our heads was now possible, and we continued to craft and shape the songs.”
The band explain “The Unholy Drum is the pulse you obey without meaning to. The rhythm that already owns you. It’s the click-track of modern existence – the subliminal march of markets, governments, algorithms, and the digital ghosts that crave our attention more than our blood. We didn’t name it to provoke. We named it because it was already there. At times it felt less like making an album and more like receiving a transmission from a future we wanted no part of. Unholy Drum is that transmission.”
Opener ‘Live Without Life’ makes it clear to any fan the band we know and love have returned, the same tones are present, but something feels different, something darker may linger in the musical fold but it doesn’t overpower. ‘Let Me Go, Satan’ as its title suggests shakes some of that darker to offer a glimpse into the light, the choral vocals hinting at a holy light in the dim. ‘Disappear’ and ‘B(o)ing’ make for an intoxicating combination, forcing you deep into their world, leaving you grasping for air when you resurface, quite possibly wondering if your sanity is in tact.
The brilliantly titled ‘Leaders with Hooves’ (we can all name at least one…) is a full aural assault and the complex layers of distorted sound brushes against our bleak political reality without delivering a manifesto – not a sermon, but the sound of a fever, a possession, a rupture. ‘Void Horizon’ takes a gentler approach, sending you into an exotic soundscape, let it take you where it will. ‘Shoot My Mind’ and ‘They Cut the Heart from Out of the Sky’ evoke a sound from a kinder time, a time when things still had shine and innocence. Concluding ‘Galaxies SOS’ is the perfect way to make you want to listen to the whole thing over again, to try and make sense of what you’ve heard and the journey you’ve been on.
‘Unholy Drum’ is an album designed to challenge views, push boundaries and allow something strange to take centre stage. It won’t be for everyone, and that is exactly the point. CODK shine a torch straight into the face of a world completely saturated with mainstream, mundane nonsense and say that’s not for us.
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