Cult Leader’s Useless Animal EP from last year included a cover of Mark Kozelek & Desertshore’s "You Are Not My Blood"—which wouldn’t be all that remarkable if Cult Leader wasn’t a metallic hardcore band. With that cover, the Salt Lake City foursome established itself as a band that wasn’t afraid to tinker, deconstruct, or simply open up and let its guts spill out. Lightless Walk is the group’s debut full-length, and while it doesn’t contain any left-field covers, it certainly doesn’t need them.
Three-quarters of Cult Leader hail from Gaza, the defunct, progressive grindcore outfit whose 2012 swansong No Absolutes in Human Suffering wound up being the most intense thing they ever produced. Lightless Walk tops it. Gaza bassist Anthony Lucero has moved up to lead vocals for Cult Leader (with new bassist Sam Richards abetting guitarist Mike Mason and drummer Casey Hansen), and his doom-soaked howl is enough to leave you wondering what took him so long to front a band. On the mutated, d-beat-meets-blastbeats jolt that is "Walking Wasteland", Lucero sings from his intestines instead of his lungs, letting Mason’s caustic riffs wash over him like an acid bath. "Great I Am" makes great use of space, hovering distortion, and needles of feedback that are somehow crosshatched into insidious melody. On the whole, Cult Leader is a more aggressive yet concise band than Gaza—and one that gets the notion of merciless self-editing. The closest that the album comes to Gaza’s savage, unrelenting excoriation of organized religion is "Gutter Gods", but even then, Lucero’s head-splitting refrain of "Our eyes are open" feels more introspective, haunted, and full of metaphysical dread than simply accusatory.
Yet Lightless Walk works just as well, if not better, when it crawls and sprawls. "A Good Life" dissolves into a drone of lurching arpeggios and Lucero’s chanted baritone; similarly, "How Deep It Runs" decelerates to a hypnotic slither. But it’s Lightless Walk’s title track that truly shows off the lessons Cult Leader learned from covering Kozelek. At over seven minutes, the song lays a tribal beats over atmospheric, minimalist guitar, a slowcore reinvention of grind that gives Lucero what seems like horrific amounts of room in which to wander, ponder, and lament—not to mention show off his chops as an apocalyptic crooner. At points, the song resembles the recent output of Swans in both ritualistic bleakness and ambition. If that’s a hint of where Cult Leader might head from here on out, even better.
There’s a backstory to Lightless Walk. Gaza’s frontman Jon Parkin was accused of rape in 2012; Gaza broke up shortly thereafter. Since then, the remaining three members have cut all ties with Parkin and spoken of him, when prodded, with a mix of bitterness and frustration. That said, Lightless Walk doesn’t feel in any way like some misguided attempt at vindication. The shadow of Gaza doesn’t hang over the album at all. Instead, the music casts its own shadows: deep, long, and teeming with the ghosts of things lost.
