Hymns From The Hills

The Artist

Poison Ruïn is the project of Philadelphia's Mac Kennedy, a one-man operation that expanded into a full band for live performance and eventually the studio. Kennedy's sound fuses medieval fantasy imagery with the raw urgency of hardcore punk, dungeon synth atmospherics, and the driving gallop of NWOBHM. Emerging from Philly's fertile DIY punk scene, the project built a cult following through lo-fi cassette releases before signing to Relapse Records for wider distribution. Their aesthetic, all castles, serpents, and pilgrims, feels equally indebted to Blitz and Bathory as it does to Discharge. Hymns From The Hills arrives as their most ambitious full-length yet, expanding the band's scope while retaining the murky, homespun feel that made them a word-of-mouth favorite.

The Album

Released in 2024 on Relapse Records, Hymns From The Hills was largely written and recorded by Kennedy in a home studio setting, with the live band contributing to flesh out the arrangements. The production keeps a deliberately hazy, cassette-warm quality even as the songwriting reaches for grander scope, weaving synth interludes between blasts of galloping punk. Thematically, the record continues Poison Ruïn's fascination with feudal parables and folk-horror imagery, using medieval settings as allegories for modern power, decay, and resistance. Tracks flow into one another with a narrative sweep, suggesting a loose concept about pilgrimage, ruin, and reckoning. It's a record built for headphones and dim rooms.

Listen For

Dungeon synth atmospherics. The "Intro" and "Sleeping Giant (Interlude)" function as world-building portals, framing the album's heavier songs with a distinctly medieval, tape-warped ambience.

The gallop rhythm. Listen for the propulsive NWOBHM-style rhythmic drive threading through "Hymn From The Hills" and "Howls From The Citadel", where hardcore urgency meets classic metal cadence.

Vocal distance and reverb. Kennedy's vocals sit buried in a wash of reverb, more incantation than confession, giving even the catchiest hooks on "Lily Of The Valley" a ghostly remove.

Recurring folk-horror imagery. Notice the repeated language of serpents, hills, pilgrims, and citadels across "Pilgrimage", "Serpents Curse", and "Crescent Sun", forming a shared symbolic vocabulary.

The closing sweep. Pay attention to how "The Standoff" resolves the album's tensions, and whether it delivers catharsis or a more ambiguous ending to the pilgrimage.