With Open Arms is the sound of Cult of Youth dragging a decade of ghosts into the light and refusing to look away. What began in 2006 as Sean Ragon’s bedroom experiment - a broken acoustic guitar, a cheap mixer, a Roland rack synth, and an obsession with post‑industrial and neo‑folk atmospheres - has, over the years, morphed into a band that made perfect sense to some and absolutely none to others. Those early records bent genre into strange, ritualistic shapes; this one takes that impulse and detonates it across 62 minutes of dark, ecstatic song‑forms.
The genesis of the album reads like a cracked pastoral myth. In 2015, after years of relentless touring, the band loaded a studio’s worth of equipment into a vehicle and headed for the Vermont mountains with no plan, no songs, and enough psychedelics to brainwash an entire state. Within two days they had cleared out a derelict barn and built a functioning studio running off a gas‑powered generator from the local hardware store. That makeshift temple of sound housed a wall of gongs, a nine‑foot marimba, an arsenal of analog synthesizers, a 24‑channel console, a full PA system, and a clutch of truly unusual instruments ranging from a human thigh bone to a champagne cork. Off the grid, they spent their days doing farm chores, shooting guns, hiking through the landscape, and recording with a clandestine cast of collaborators. Every harebrained idea that surfaced was tried; nothing was vetoed.
Eventually, reality pulled them back. The barn was abandoned, but the tapes remained - skeletal songs, half‑formed structures, long stretches of hallucinated improvisation. Over the next five years, this material was hauled through various studios in Queens, Berlin and Brooklyn, cut up, rearranged, sampled, reversed and patiently deciphered. What had begun as raw, psychedelic sprawl was slowly carved into shape, without sanding off its weirdness. In late 2020, Jeff Berner - whom Ragon had met as a touring member of Psychic TV - was brought in to help wrestle the trove into coherence, an apparently insurmountable task that meant finding an arc through hours of sound without losing the sense of risk that produced it.
The result, With Open Arms, is a double album that serves as a sonic effigy of the pain and suffering collectively lived through the last seven years, and an attempt at psychic exorcism. The record doesn’t simply document turmoil; it stages it, moves through it, and comes out the other side with teeth bared and arms open. The songs fold together the esoteric underground influences that have always driven Cult of Youth - post‑industrial ritual, neo‑folk melancholy, anarchic noise, and odd psychedelia - into a newly sharpened identity Ragon calls “pagan post punk.” Rhythms are insistent but skewed, guitars by turns serrated and chiming, synths alternately torch‑lit and frostbitten. Chants, invocations and hooks crash into one another, building a language that feels both ancient and freshly scarred.
