After 26 studio albums, surrealist rock outfit The Church have earned the right to release a low-stakes victory lap full of crowd-pleasers and lazy lyrics. Instead, they’ve given us The Hypnogogue. This multi-layered wonder doesn’t linger on the band’s past—it reinterprets their history and burnishes The Church’s irresistible sound as they experiment with song structure, explore new depths of introspection, and envision a fever-dream future.     

In the opening track “Ascendence,” the medium is the message; after a downward dive-bomb fakeout, the track rises in both pitch and intensity. Initially metronomic drums disintegrate into frenzied fills as the central guitar spirals upward like a smoke plume. The track almost functions as a Shephard tone, a distressing auditory illusion that establishes a sense of unease and warning.

This tension evaporates into a trinity of lovely, wistful songs. The nostalgic “C’est La Vie” sees frontman Steve Kilbey channel David Bowie’s smoldering sprechgesang over the intricate, shimmering guitar lines that have hallmarked the band’s output since the beginning. “I Think I Knew” is more modern and anthemic with the potential to be saccharine, but the plaintive, steady build pays off in an emotional chord change after verse two that can’t help but stir the spirit.  “Flickering Lights,” like “Ascendence,” is aptly titled, evoking a scene of prayer candles stacked in broad rows as a piano that sparkles and winks over a warbled chorale and echoing whispers. The guitar that breaks the relative silence toward the end of the song is more flare than flicker, but it doesn’t last — it is the final gust of wind through the cathedral doors, sending the candles dancing before snuffing them out.

The lone piano continues in darkness before “The Hypnogogue” whirs to life, all dizzy guitars and steady-but-stuttering drums. Lyrically, the album’s title track plays as a mood board for the band’s unmistakable sound, and every lyric is delicious. “Piano trickling into the cans/insulating guitars, reptilian bass/kick in your face, the snare in your heart”, or “woozy strings in the garden…suddenly we had too much/the organs were swelling/the moonbeams were burning.”

But the intent behind this loping, chthonic odyssey is quite literal and is written as a concept piece, with a backstory that feels at home among the cyberpunk nightmares of William Gibson and Melissa Scott. Kilbey writes: “The Hypnogogue is set in 2054. A dystopian and broken down future. Invented by Sun Kim Jong, a North Korean scientist and occult dabbler. It is a machine and a process that pulls music straight of the dreams.”

Indulge me as I break out my notebook and calculator. The Church has released 26 studio albums, averaging 11 songs per album (possibly more, since this count is skewed by Jammed, the 2004 improv album with two long tracks). The average song contains 200 words, which would put the band’s cumulative lyrics at the length of a respectable novel. And in this imaginary, surreal masterpiece of a novel that I suddenly would very much like to own, sleep and dreams are a key motif. “Albert Ross,”the track that immediately follows “The Hypnogogue,”  opens with the lyric “I think I’m going back to sleep now” and tracks on earlier albums bear titles like “Nightmare,” “The Dead Man’s Dream,” and “Delirious.”

The Hypnogogue device and its role in the mythology of The Church is fascinating. Here is a band that codified an extensive and beloved genre literally called Dream Pop with “Under The Milky Way Tonight,” implying that Steve Kilbey and company are not only dreamers themselves, but are also figures who have shaped and influenced the dreams of whole generations. They are an illustration of the recursive nature of the dream and the dreamer. Dale Cooper and the Bookhouse Boys, but also Gordon Cole/David Lynch/Monica Belluci. Ancient Greeks received instruction and warning in their sleep, but also Morpheus and the Oneiroi–dream-givers and dreams personified.

So what could be more compelling and terrifying to a prolific songwriter like Kilbey than a machine that draws on the unconscious and makes music from dreams? The Church often employ unconventional instruments to give body and intrigue to a song, from a beautifully jarring interlude in the aforementioned “Under the Milky Way Tonight” (see: bagpipes) to the myriad mallets, synth sounds and layers of distortion warping the orchestra throughout The Hypnogogue. They’ve employed every tool possible to put their dreams to music, and it’s possible that the only tool left exists only in the realm of fantasy. Like most speculative dystopian biotech, the thought of utilizing such a tool is as alluring as it is dreadful. When the titular machine–a chilling, inevitable extension of our discussions around AI-generated art– is finally invented in 2054, I imagine that The Church will serve as a prime example of how dreaming up music the old-fashioned way is as human as it gets. 

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