“NEXT TIME LET’S GET RAISED BY WOLVES,” bellows Seeming’s new album, SOL. Subtitled A SelfBanishment
Ritual, this second LP by the NY-based postgothic gets personal with its posthuman politics, mapping
a program for ego-death through psychedelic soul, 70s funk, synthpop, and dire noise.
SOL bares fractured humanity, practices apocalyptic shamanism, and raises the ghosts of pop’s yesteryear, all to
an ultimately uplifting effect.
Co-produced with Daniel Myer (Haujobb) and Paul Kendall (per Depeche Mode, NIN, Nitzer Ebb), SOL boasts
guest appearances by Pitchfork favorite S∆MMUS and Japanoise legend Merzbow. Standout tracks include the
outsider anthem “Stranger,” vocoder ballad “I Love You Citizen,” the explosive “Talk About Bones,” and “If I Were
You,” a song transcribed from a posthumous performance by John Balance (Coil) in a dream. SOL comes with
an 11-track bonus CD (Faceless) featuring the outstanding synthpop cut “Yes Artemis” (a cut of pagan eco-pop)
and the electro “Angel in the Jungle.” A 2017 tour is announced.
Seeming’s debut Madness & Extinction was called Album of the Year by leading dark music blog IDieYouDie, and
their single “The Burial” was named song of the year by AModelOfControl. The band’s Worldburners EP reached
#1 on Bandcamp’s overall sales charts in 2015. SOL is the next chapter: the world after the world.
Seeming is equal parts transcendent pop and eco-tinged nihilism. Led by author/theorist/composer Alex Reed,
the New York-based act broke out in 2014 with their heady debut single “The Burial” and their first LP Madness &
Extinction, which earned an Album of the Year award from darkwave tastemakers IDieYouDie.
Having previously made four LPs with the electro-postpunk ThouShaltNot, Reed sculpted Seeming to be leaner,
larger, and singleminded in its posthuman purpose: with pounding funeral drums, blaring brass, and synth
melodies galore, this is indie pop to conjure an apocalypse that you can dance to. Seeming comes by this paradox
honestly: Reed has taught both pop songwriting and punk history at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute.
2017’s followup SOL: A Self-Banishment Ritual introduces 1970s funk and psychedelia into Seeming’s sound,
and it delivers on the promise Reed made in his 400-page book Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music—
to craft grandiose, otherworldly music that speaks with radically progressive fervor to real 21st-century crises of
politics, race, population, and animal rights. With a full-bodied baritone voice, Seeming dissents against the
human world of the past and future: no one is safe.