Philadelphia’s Poison Ruïn emerged from the shadows in 2021, with two demo tapes of nervy and angular “dungeon punk” crudely recorded on budget gear. The brainchild of Mac Kennedy, the sole recording member of the band, they soon found a home at Relapse Records, and followed up with 2023’s acclaimed Härvest. Now Mac is back with Hymns From the Hills, bringing a newfound fidelity to the band’s sound while retaining the rough edges that brought so many fans into the fold. For Hymns From The Hills, Mac leveled up from his South Philly rehearsal space and set up shop in nearby Clifton Heights in a “somewhat treated room” that had absorption panels installed. Rather than centering the studio around a master console, Mac employs a Mackie 1642 and a “busted ass” Allen & Heath MixWizard to provide portability for his process of recording all of the instruments for Poison Ruïn himself. With a shelf along the wall, he’s able to work in a modular fashion, positioning the board by his Tama Granstar kit for drums or sliding it down to track guitars.
Although the band features a full lineup of Philly punx: Allen Chapman (drums, ex-Sheer Mag), Nao Demand (guitar, Zorn), and Will McAndrew (bass, The Damage), it was agreed to keep the “if it ain't broke, don’t fix it” approach to recording and have Mac record all the instruments himself. Sonically falling somewhere between punk and metal, or “driving rock music,” the philosophy is to push on the boundaries of the genre without losing the thread. Recording solo enabled Mac to take his time to come up with leftfield ideas. “One of the beautiful things of recording with a group of people is there’s an inertia to it. Decisions are made and that’s how you see what works. For Poison Ruïn, I’m not seeking that inertia. I want to push out more against the walls and do something different.”
Sitting down to track, Mac sees a “golden ratio” in having songs 80 percent written, allowing room for things to change rather than being locked into a rigid structure. Starting with the drums, he puts in accents for vocal lines, creating “erosion paths” that subsequent guitar and bass overdubs reinforce. Drums are recorded in sections to allow for 2 to 4 bpm variations for certain riffs. Guitars and bass are comped over completed drum tracks, retaining a bit of scrappy unpredictability as the song coalesces. Coming from a punk background, Mac finds this technique gives a “roughness around the edges” similar to the raw sounds he grew up on.
The propulsive and tight drum sound of Hymns from the Hills fits the overall upgrade in sonics from the previous album Härvest. Mac feels comfortable working with the “blunt tools of lo-fi,” as earlier Poison Ruïn recordings allowed him the freedom to go crazy and push things. After touring Japan in 2024, Mac was impressed by the “extremely juiced” sound systems in the local “live houses,” feeling the clarity of the sound gave it a feeling of “potential energy” and sharpness while retaining the raw artifacts of lo-fi. The realization that working solo “farm to table” in the studio might cause him to “carve everything into oblivion” it was time to enlist producer Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, High Vis) to help inject some clarity into the music. After pre-mixing songs to his best ability, Mac handed the mixes over to Jonah to put his spin on them.
Perhaps the most essential element of Poison Ruïn’s sound is the guitar tone, one that sits in an undefinable range between punk, post-punk, and metal, and driven by the unusual choice of a Guild Surfliner Deluxe. With older guitars falling apart on earlier tours, Mac grabbed the Surfliner as a floor model, and it just happened to become his main axe. The Surfliner enables Mac to cut through the mix as the music calls for heavy riffing, “cowboy chords,” and picked single note lines. Splitting the signal between a Roland Jazz Chorus and a Music Man 410-65 gives more room to work with the stereo field. There’s even a “Poison Ruïn” fuzz pedal layered in sections of the recording, a custom-made gift given to the band from Artemis Effects.
While not sticking to a specific vocal chain, Mac achieves a distinct and immersive reverb on the vocals through plug-in processing. “People don’t EQ or treat their post-processing enough.” Reverbs are even sent to multiple tracks, with oversaturation and high pass filtering producing “big balls of frequencies” that are later clinically carved into usable sound. He sums it up best: “Record the thing, bar-b-que it, and then cut the burnt parts off”
Working in the basement of a school a few years back, Mac came across an abandoned Kurzweil K2000, which provides the layers of synth magic in the album’s intro and tracks like “Howls from Citadel.” The instrument was his introduction to the “beauty” of MIDI and SysEx programming, although tracking for Hymns was done by recording the synth’s audio direct, in the “naive” spirit of the dungeon synth genre. Mac has also created a pure dungeon synth entity as Shadow Knell, recording with soft synths in Ableton as an outlet to easily create on the road with Poison Ruin.
Looking back on the finished recording of Hymns from the Hills, Mac loves how it turned out, and found working remotely with Jonah to be quick and effective. “He’s a very creative guy, and there are aspects of the vocal processing that I left space for us to work it out together.” The album was mastered by Arthur Rizk [Tape Op #150], who had previously mastered Härvest, and he nailed the final master after only a handful of notes.
“We’re trying to do something different without losing the sound we’d established before. The goal was to show that our sound isn’t an explicitly lo-fi thing. What does a clearer, more high-fidelity Poison Ruïn sound like? What does that mean?”
It means by the time you’re halfway through second track “Lily of the Valley” you’re dressed in full chain mail, banging your head, with a scythe hoisted triumphantly.
