Premiere • 
Art that does not merely depict freedom but makes it tangible as a possibility – that is an old demand. Horse Lords fulfil it. Their stated aim: »We try to make music that challenges the status quo and offers a path toward liberation for the listener«. Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!, the band’s fourth studio album, will be released on 12 June 2026 via RVNG Intl.
Formed in Baltimore in 2010, the band – Owen Gardner (guitar), Max Eilbacher (bass), Sam Haberman (drums), and Andrew Bernstein (alto saxophone) – expand their rhythmically interlocked sonic architecture here through additional brass and woodwind: Madison Greenstone (bass clarinet) and Weston Olencki (trombone), as well as, for the first time, vocals sung by Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor.
Collectivity without hierarchy
This is audible from the outset on »Eureka 378-B« and »Brain of the Firm«, both premiering here today. First comes nineteenth-century Sacred Harp music: communal singing without an audience, collectivity as a sonic principle. Then those same voices reappear within Horse Lords’ rhythmically interlocked framework.
The politics become explicit on »After the Last Sky«. The title refers to a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, written out of the experience of displacement and the loss of home. Liberation as a demand – either for everyone, or not at all. Horse Lords make that liberation audible.
