Put on your Sunday best, kids, because The Austerity Program are taking your asses to church. Singer/guitarist Justin Foley and bassist Thad Calabrese are back with Bible Songs I, their first new album under their own moniker since 2014’s Beyond Calculation. It’s a goddamn mean piece of work, and “2 Kings 25 1 - 7” might just be its meanest offering. The song recounts the fate of Zedekiah, who, having been installed as Israel’s puppet king by Nebuchadnezzar, turned around and bit the hand that fed him, with predictably horrific consequences (somewhere in the Midwest, some soul-patched youth pastor with a shell necklace is telling a coffee house full of teens that the Bible was the original Game of Thrones, and tbh, he’s not totally off the mark).
Previous AP albums have found the band’s songcraft blossoming into a towering cathedral of sound, but “2 Kings” strips back all that majesty and lays bare a violence and ferocity appropriate to its source material. The duo weaves a pounding, ever-mutating series of riffs over a programmed drum track that hits like a piston-driven shiv to the ribs. When Foley and Calabrese pull back during the song’s near-silent bridge, it’s less like they’re catching their breath and more like they’re scanning your carcass for virgin soft tissue to puncture.
Bible Songs I drops June 14, so plan on making your peace with the Creator before then.
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