Dan Meyer - Kneeling (2025) Hi-Res

Kneeling is a collection of songs that stretch beautiful melodies over increasingly rough surfaces. Each song features towering layers of at least a dozen guitars, many layered voices, and even doubled bass and drum parts. It’s divided into two halves (Side A, Side B): the first is a collection of thick indie rock songs, and the second half is atmospheric black metal.

Side A is full of weird biblical imagery. After getting sober a few years back, Dan went looking for God in the Old Testament and was inspired by all the strange stuff he discovered. The Ugly Man is a fantasy of how a biblical writer might have described God punishing the pornstar Ron Jeremy. 16 Angels is a fantasia describing a man donating blood to a group of angels. In Omen, Dan watches the apocalypse unfold with his beloved dog Shiloh. And Sacrificing a Calf is a literal description of the ritual for cattle sacrifice described in Leviticus.

Side B is six atmospheric black metal songs about Los Angeles. Dan never wrote lyrics for these songs but rather improvised shrieks and howls and superimposed them onto an enormous stack of distorted guitars and basses. Broadly speaking, these songs try to articulate the experience of driving around Los Angeles at night. It’s a huge city, but it looks kinda empty.

Best known for his work as a guitarist and vocalist in Agriculture, the Los Angeles-based transcendental black metal band, Dan Meyer brings the same ecstatic intensity to Kneeling. Where Agriculture focuses on soaring, cathartic compositions, Kneeling turns inward, embracing dense textures and raw, layered recordings that blur the line between beauty and abrasion.

According to Meyer, “I wanted these songs to sound like huge piles—big leafy piles that you could just jump into. I wasn’t worried about fidelity and actually wanted weird audio artifacts to pop up from all the layering. My rule was just to record everything as many times as I could before I had to get up to stretch or pee or whatever. I kept a lot of bad takes in the mixes too. Everything was recorded on a vintage Tascam 4-track and then transferred to my computer. I just wanted them to sound huge and small at the same time.”