Poison Ruïn have always operated like a band out of time—equal parts dungeon and basement show, their music dragging medieval dread into the fluorescent ugliness of the present. Hymns from the Hills doesn’t abandon that formula so much as it blows up the walls out around it.
The Philadelphia outfit’s second full-length on Relapse is, simply put, their most ambitious record yet. Mac Kennedy and company have layered analog synths and genuinely eerie ambient passages into the band’s signature metallic crunch, and the result feels less like additions bolted onto a punk record and more like they’ve been there all along, waiting to be excavated. The tape-recorded warmth that gave their early work its charm is still very much present but the sonic palette has expanded considerably.
What’s remarkable is how the songwriting keeps pace with the ambition. Hymns from the Hills is a 13-track record that doesn’t sag in the middle, a genuine rarity. Kennedy’s vocals lean harder into melody this time around, taking some real risks that mostly pay off in full. One track I absolutely adore is “Eidolon” which sets the tone perfectly: propulsive, dark, a little strange, and immediately memorable.
Lyrically, the band continues mining medieval and fantasy imagery on songs like “Lily Of The Valley,” “Pilgrimage,” and “Howls From The Citadel,” not as escapism but as mythology — a way of talking about the present through symbols that sit outside of it. There’s genuine intellectual weight behind the aesthetic, and Kennedy has clearly thought hard about what these images are actually doing in his songs. It gives the record a coherence that a lot of punk records with this kind of scope simply lack.
Hymns from the Hills is the sound of a band that knows exactly who they are and is no longer content to stay there. Highly recommended.
