SATANIC PLANET have announced "Dead Deities", their second album and their first for Relapse Records, out October 30. The first single, "Sam Alito's Mom", arrives with a video.
The Relapse deal was announced back in April; this is the record it was signed for. The more consequential change is how the album was made. Lucien Greaves — co-founder and spokesperson of The Satanic Temple — Luke Henshaw (PLANET B, SONIDO DE LA FRONTERA, FIRST POWER CREW), Dave Lombardo (SLAYER, MISFITS, MR. BUNGLE, DEAD CROSS) and Justin Pearson (THE LOCUST, SWING KIDS, DEAF CLUB) worked as a fully together-in-the-studio band this time, rather than assembling parts at distance. Greaves describes the resulting material as both more personal and more closely aligned with the aims of The Satanic Temple, which states that it seeks to "encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practiced common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits."
Musically the record is pitched as a trip through modern dark music: tolling bells, blackened synth, noise interludes, drums described as heavy as a mountain, and group vocals. On "Sam Alito's Mom", Greaves and Pearson's voices coil around one another at a slow, growling pace — an assault built out of decades of touring and experimentation, running from SLAYER and THE LOCUST through PLANET B's avant-garde sci-fi hip-hop to MR. BUNGLE's bizarro orchestrations.
The title refers to the arch-conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, who authored the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, and to a piece of activism rather than a simple insult. Greaves explains the reference directly:
"In an effort to preserve reproductive rights in the face of theocratic opposition, The Satanic Temple has opened three abortion clinics and is currently working toward opening a fourth. We named the first of our clinics 'Sam Alito's Mom's Satanic Abortion Clinic,' and following the opening of the fourth clinic, we are going to sue to establish our religious freedom to ship abortion pharmaceuticals to any state in the U.S. regardless of their restrictions on bodily autonomy. This is our fight, and this is our song about that fight."
The band frame "Dead Deities" as a call to arms against autocracy in the age of Christian nationalism — protest music, in their words, with bite and bark in equal doses. Whether or not you share the politics, it is a rare case of a record whose lead single is legibly attached to a specific, ongoing legal campaign.
"Dead Deities" track listing:
- Damnatio Memoriae
- Antichrist
- Church Burning
- Dead Deities
- Sam Alito's Mom
- Headless Man
- Dr. Green
- Cannibal Syndrome
- Ouroboros
- Ammosexual
- Satan's Spawn
Pre-orders are open now ahead of the October 30 release.