Today, Ted Hearne — the composer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist praised by Pitchfork for creating “some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory” — announces FARMING, a new album created in collaboration with the three-time GRAMMY Award-winning choir The Crossing. FARMING is due out October 17 via Deathbomb Arc, the independent label behind releases by a wide-ranging assemblage of trailblazing experimental acts like Death Grips, clipping., JPEGMAFIA, Julia Holter, and They Hate Change.

Lead single “Country” is operatic and intense — a collision of folk guitar, auto-tune, itchy IDM percussion, and seasick fanfares for a sinister, ever-metastasizing vision of manifest destiny.

Listen to “Country” here.
Pre-order / pre-save FARMING here.

Upon its 2023 live performance debut, fittingly held on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, The New York Times called FARMING “a suggestive, chaotically ambitious, often poignant reflection on colonization, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship.” NPR called it “twitchy, allusive, often synthetic and surrealistic. It delivers what I can only describe as a full sensory overload.”

FARMING confronts technology’s ominous encroachment upon humanity’s very being. Against an uncanny soundworld fraught with neck-breaking shifts and stylistic contradictions, Hearne tackles the long-tail impact of settler colonialism, agricultural degradation, big tech utopianism, corporate religiosity, and the abstraction of community. The album’s unholy marriage of ersatz Americana, digitally altered choral arrangements, and hyperpop’s synapse-frying maximalism inverts technology’s smoothing impulses in favor of an unwieldy, knotty expression of modern ennui and alienation.

It’s an enveloping experience: Auto-tune choirs are twisted into unnatural harmonies as they detail the new human identification capabilities of artificial intelligence (“Is there a human in the picture?” they ask); a CEO’s recursive and contradictory origin story is cast as a mournful Sinatra torch song strewn with digital detritus; and a stack of voices, backed by an accompaniment that evokes a Richard D. James-authored soundtrack to The Jetsons, asks the seemingly self-evident but harrowing question of “What are greens, and how do they work?”

Throughout FARMING, every soulful element of human performance — a beautiful vocal phrase, a touching harmony — is threatened to be enveloped by the sinister application of technological processing. In conjuring this aural trip into the Uncanny Valley, Hearne’s varied influences make themselves evident: Meredith Monk’s pioneering avant vocal ensembles, SOPHIE’s winking and elastic productions, Jockstrap’s digitally damaged balladry, and Daniel Lopatin’s long-running crusade against timbral fascism. While not techno-phobic, FARMING is certainly wary of how deeply intertwined we’ve become with services and tools whose primary purposes are surveillance and advertisement.

It’s an intellectually audacious undertaking, repurposing primary texts from William Penn and Jeff Bezos as it contends with the mythological constructs humans erect to justify their participation in an economy’s unfeeling entropies — and reveals the ethical void at their core.

Learn more about the motivations and themes behind FARMING in a 2023 interview for NPR Weekend Edition here.