We’ve followed Jordan Hoban’s jesus is the path to heaven across recent years, charting their development of a singularly stark, eschatological style of folk that’s attuned to both the blood and ghosts of Christianity. “Debut hell verses introduced the project, a three-song EP which drew on the King James Bible to evoke visions of the underworld, landing somewhere adjacent to the Southern Gothic folk of Jim White or Johnny Dowd,” we wrote back in 2022, with “each subsequent release [building] upon this foundation in increasingly strange and visionary ways.” There was what we called the “haunted transmissions” of Holy Hour, and subsequently Book of Moths, what the band themselves called “a dark devotional for the mothgod” which drew its lyrics from the King James Version and Mepkin Abbey Psalter and, as per our review, mirrored the complex imagery of its namesake lepidopteran in its foreboding atmosphere. “A collection of solemn and often unsettling songs grounded in the profound weight of its surroundings,” as we continued. “Songs, that is, fitting of their titular creature: fragile and vulnerable, capable of great destruction, ultimately drawn to the light.”
Released a year later, The Deadchrist pushed the jesus is a path to heaven project towards a more diverse palette while only deepening its thematic concerns. “There are elements of David Bazan in the religious guilt and fury of the lyrics, Sufjan Stevens in the soft vocals, as well as the likes of talons’ in the despondent quiet,” as our review noted, and the results was a sound able to embrace seemingly contradictory moods in one complete package. A feat inherently religious, where mortal insignificance and supernatural sublime collide into something doom-laden, unknowable and holding potential salvation. “The simultaneity of darkness and light is the spirit of the deadchrist,” we continued in our piece:
Take the pain and beauty of ‘the fawn’, where death is both an end and a beginning, or ‘lord, you called’ with its unique blend of optimism and torment. Hoban has described the jesus is the path to heaven project as one exploring the “effect religious trauma has on the human body,” though it stands apart in how it does this with such a direct engagement with Christian themes. Suffering as the central tenet of existence. Agony and love as the same thing.
This summer sees Hoban and co. return with brand new full-length Power !, and lead single ‘The Lord Has Bled A Line’ suggests a continued, ever-deepening engagement with this core aesthetic. If its predecessor could be said to have displayed marginally warmer or more personable strokes, ‘The Lord Has Bled A Line’ snaps back toward desolation. An expansive, brooding number which possesses an almost medieval air, tapping into ancient frameworks of fear and belief and dragging them into the contemporary moment. “The Lord has bled / from heart to heart, / down the Fall Line,” Hoban sings in the opening lines, his vocals appearing after five minutes of building instrumentation as though precipitating from the pregnant air. “The Lord has bled a line / a thousand miles across / the beltway of 40, / to the shoreline / where He found me.” As ever, there’s a devotional quality to the sound, though one which bends towards the apocalyptic, asking the question that seems most pertinent in the project’s entire body of work. What is it that lies at the end of the line drawn by the Lord, deliverance or damnation?
Album art buy Emily Warner