The nature of experimental music makes it so that trying new things doesn't always work well, and trying new things lands upon sounds that we haven't gotten used to, so a listener can have two different reactions to being challenged by music in such a way: the music is either too unconventional or the experiment fails and thus they don't like it, or they enjoy being challenged by music that is unconventional, even if that experiment might not be completely successful. When these two reactions meet in critical spaces, that kind of divisiveness only makes those reactions more extreme. That's how you got albums like The Ark Work be simultaneously dragged through the mud while appearing on multiple year end lists. Black metal especially seems to exist in this contradictory state where it evolved both an experimental ethos and a purity culture of "trveness", which explains why some of the most divisive of bands come, at least tangentially, from black metal, derogatively being grouped as "hipster black metal".
Agriculture might not have created such a zeitgeist of divisiveness the way that Deafheaven and Liturgy did, despite being clearly inspired by both bands, and having received a modicum of attention of their own. Perhaps experimental black metal of this kind no longer draws the same eyerolls and vitriolic calls of pretentiousness when you have bigger issues like Sleep Token or whatever else the kids are into these days. Our first encounter with Agriculture might not have been a particularly enjoyable one, for quite understandable reasons. The band's blackgaze sound felt churned into a disjointing filter, one that felt like it was purposefully throwing left field elements into the mix in order to be shocking and noisy.
The Spiritual Sound, while not being a rethread of Agriculture or Living Is Easy, is unlikely to change the minds of people put off by the aforementioned. The band still revels in being disjointed and throwing left field elements in the mix. The clean vocals are still off putting even to me. I still can't get the band's visual comparison to Big Thief that some commenter made out of my head. What did decisively change was the band's mix of sounds away from the more black metal / blackgaze roots and into something that's a tad more difficult to pinpoint.
A lot of my favorite moments on The Spiritual Sound came in the form of specific guitar melodies, ones that anchor the band's music within more conventional waters, and ones that bring to mind genres other than black metal, some more tender like post-rock and slowcore, some have a melodicism to them that still feels recognizably metal, while some have a muscular grooviness to them that's more alt metal focused, sometimes steeped in sludge or noise rock. For example "Bodhidharma" feels like it lives for the contrast between a Deftones riff, an overly fragile falsetto, and some screamo shrieks.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there's not still plenty of the black metal / blackgaze sound still left on The Spiritual Sound, some of it in the harsher shrieks that themselves sound more like the screamo-adjacent ones a la George Clark, some of it being pretty much melodic black metal in how they use guitar melodies. Both the black and the overwhelming non-black elements show that they could've made for a really great conventional album if it was stripped of its more experimental edges, making the end product feel like it requires a compromise. Its disjointed side is either a dealbreaker that one has to get used to, or something that does set the music apart and makes Agriculture feel like Agriculture instead of another post-black metal band. Both are valid.
