Present Day, October 2026
There is a general in the United States military who has described the current conflict in the Persian Gulf as a holy war to bring about the second coming of Christ. He said this to the troops under his command. This is a man in charge of significant destructive capacity, describing mass violence as the instrument of divine will: the oldest and most reliable method for getting people to do things that would otherwise be obviously unconscionable.
I have been watching this machinery operate since the First Crusade. The vocabulary changes. The underlying architecture does not. You identify a category of enemy whose elimination serves God’s purposes. You designate that elimination as an act of worship rather than murder. You find the men who need the designation in order to act, and you give them the designation, and they act.
Sanctified Hunger is the album I will release next year. I wrote these songs across several years, in the knowledge that human religious violence is not a historical phenomenon that has been outgrown. It is an ongoing one that has simply found new theaters and new vocabulary. I wrote the album before this general made this statement. The statement makes the album feel, if anything, more necessary.
Five hundred years of watching this wheel turn, and I still find the turning exhausting. This is not cynicism. The exhaustion is the evidence that I have not made my peace with it, which I have not, and which I do not intend to. The wheel turns. I am still watching. The watching is the work.