Horse Lords’ Heaven Can’t Wait

By the time of the release of Horse Lords’ last proper album, 2022’s Comradely Objects, three-fourths of the group—saxophonist Andrew Bernstein, bassist Max Eilbacher and guitarist Owen Gardner—had left their native Baltimore for Germany, leaving only drummer Sam Haberman in Charm City. Such a fracture would normally sink a band, especially one that had been active for a decade, with five ambitious, esoteric albums to their credit and a solid, but perhaps not growing, fan base. A three-year gap followed, not exactly reassuring worried fans, until the band emerged in 2025 on FRKWYS Vol. 18: Extended Field, a collaboration with minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt, whose innovations with the just intonation tuning system and fondness for springy, miraculously unpredictable repetition is a clear influence. Still, the austere tone of that album—more of a Dreyblatt slow burn than an ecstatic Horse Lords spiral—may have caused some to worry that the band had only gotten together because of the opportunity to work with an inspirational figure. But with the release of the riotous, assertive, deeply eccentric Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, Horse Lords have conclusively proven that a little thing like an intervening ocean isn’t going to cramp their style or stop their evolution. 

Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! opens with vocals, a big step for a primarily instrumental band, and even more so when the voices are female (courtesy the operatic soprano Nina Guo and electronic musician Evelyn Saylor), highly processed and ambivalently Appalachian, a snippet of an old shape-note hymn sung by a choir of mechanical seraphim or intoned by a bagpipe trying to sound human. The trained precision of the vocals aligns with the electronic manipulation to create an eerie dissonance with the rustic holiness of the melody. More vocal pieces follow, all short (the longest is a minute and a half, the shortest eight seconds), all with numbered, suggestively geometric titles (“Rotation I,” “Rotation II” etc.). It’s the sort of thing that could easily take over an entire album, but Horse Lords instead use these folky fragments as keystones and seeds, building groovy, syncopated structures around them while watching what grows from the organic elements. 

If that sounds somewhat contradictory, it should. Horse Lords have always dealt in paradox, making tightly wound music that’s constantly uncoiling, fashioning propulsive riffs out of static, theoretical material, assembling sublimity from exposed nerves and raw, twitchy fibers. On Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, they’ve refined their approach to industrial-grade exactitude, with tracks like the chiming, droning, somehow funky “Before the Law” slotting into the acoustic pulse of “After the Last Sky” with intricate cunning. Sometimes, the vocals are threaded through the modernist constructions, as on “Brain of the Firm” and “A City Yet to Come,” like ivy winding around a geodesic dome. Improbably, it all hangs together, forming a kind of folk-art futurist suite. Horse Lords may have dispersed, but it’s only made them tighter and more committed.

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By the time of the release of Horse Lords’ last proper album, 2022’s Comradely Objects, three-fourths of the group—saxophonist Andrew Bernstein, bassist Max Eilbacher and guitarist Owen Gardner—had left their native Baltimore for Germany, leaving only drummer Sam Haberman in Charm City. Such a fracture would normally sink a band, especially one that had been […]Reed Jackson{authorlink}https://www.spinmagazine.com/feed/SPINMusic News, Album Reviews, Concert Photos, Videos and Morehttps://static.spinmagazine.com/files/2023/08/cropped-logo-spin-s-340×340.png