From their early, solitary and lo-fi days, Poison Ruïn have invoked the epic. They’re a punk band running on a heavy metal engine, with roaring power chord riffs fit for the dive and the D.I.Y. space alike, and a visual aesthetic made for patches on denim vests.
But Poison Ruïn was an idea before it was a band—a unique, fully formed and potent idea at that. Launched by Mac Kennedy as a self-recorded solo project in Philadelphia in 2020 when, due to lockdown restrictions, starting an actual punk band wasn’t a viable option, Poison Ruïn made its introduction through two EPs teeming with roaring, metal-tinged lo-fi punk rock featuring dungeon synth intros and interludes, and bearing artwork with fantasy imagery and a lyrical urgency filtered through medieval metaphor: socio-political commentary with swords. As one Bandcamp supporter commented on their debut EP, “let’s open this round table up.”
Once Poison Ruïn hit the ground running, however, they moved at the pace of Hüsker Dü in 1985. Their first two cassette EPs, recorded solely by Kennedy, quickly found an audience and sold out before venues opened back up again. With a lineup solidified—guitarist Nao Demand, bassist Will McAndrew and drummer Allen Chapman—Poison Ruïn graduated from the practice space to the stage after nearly a year of rehearsals. And they haven’t slackened their pace since.
“I had never toured to the extent we have in any previous groups and I had never played this many shows with a group of people, so you just start to learn a lot about what works,” Kennedy says via Zoom from his apartment, behind him a neatly arranged display of house plants.
Poison Ruïn’s universe has been in a state of constant expansion ever since. After first seeing the release of their first and second EPs on vinyl via the small Australian label Urge, the group made the leap to venerated metal imprint Relapse, which released their full-length debut Härvest in 2023, an album that despite the graduation in visibility still retained their scruffy dungeon grime aesthetic. Their second album Hymns from the Hills, out in April, sees a further erosion of limitations while maintaining the raw intensity at the heart of their sound. Kennedy’s methods haven’t changed—he recorded this album himself, just as he did with Poison Ruïn’s previous releases. But Hymns from the Hills also benefits from the expertise of two studio professionals—Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco mixed the album, and Arthur Rizk, veteran producer of artists such as Power Trip and Blood Incantation, mastered it—to give it an added clarity, allowing the details to stand out within the group’s blazing anthems.
The process wasn’t without some growing pains; Kennedy admits he’s been reluctant to give up some of the control he’s had over the shape of the band’s records since the beginning. But after hearing the finished product, he acknowledges the difference having a few extra hands on the record has made.
“With this record, I basically felt confident enough after doing this a few times and having people like it or not like it, to get over that hump of not existing in a weird little hole making music, and existing out in the world,” he says. “Part of that process is working with other people. This is still very much something that I, primarily, was working on, but I’ve had my time where I got to do everything my little way, and this was just trying to be more in the world with something.
“Like working with Jonah (Falco) on mixing it, that was challenging for me at first,” he adds. “I’m very, very happy with how it sounds, but I’m just not used to bringing someone else in to make all these decisions that I have at my fingers. But he was able to do things that I am not.”
Paired with the enhanced clarity on Hymns From the Hills is an even more versatile approach to songwriting, as its songs explore sonic terrain beyond the group’s punk and heavy metal roots. Where “Lily of the Valley” leans more post-punk in its arpeggios and eerie keyboard accents than it does old-school scuzz, harmonica wheezes through the title track like a speeding train, and “Howls from the Citadel” is an actual ballad, steeped in Scott Walker baroque. While many of these are firsts for Poison Ruïn, Kennedy says the seeds were planted early on, allowing the group the freedom and space for stylistic progression and growth.
“It’s easier to get things right when you’re starting out small and you get specific,” he says. “I can keep something in the field of view and the field of mind more easily and check it and make sure it’s working as a total piece when it’s very specific. But I would think of those projects and the things they showed and talked about as close up looks or smaller glances at a wider field of view. So that’s why on old records I’d have some wild card element, something that would push the wall open so to speak. The intention is to show that there is more room or other things to say.”
Poison Ruïn does, however, remain committed to their cathartic commentary on oppressive systems and the need for solidarity to strike back against them. “Hymn From the Hills” is an empowering narrative about just such a fight, Kennedy singing “fall back and find a better place to make a stand / for one reason or another / dropped off and discarded on the borders of this land / sisters and brothers form a bond and form a band” in its first verse.
Despite misconceptions like the idea that their lyrical threads are “meant to exist in some created Tolkien-esque world,” as Kennedy puts it, their perspective is a bit less elven, a lot more human.
“This is what Leonard Cohen does. It’s what Motörhead does,” he says. “They write about shooting guys in the desert, but they’re not really fucking talking about that. They’re talking about feelings and life.
“It’s poetic mode,” he adds. “It all comes from feeling. It all comes from my life, or it happens to people I care about, or even people I don’t know. It’s all cathartic. I could just be saying I feel this and I feel that, it’s just as emotional and involved as an inner experience writing and performing this music as anything else.”
The farther that Poison Ruïn continue their spiral outward, the more powerful the experiences and the deeper the connections they make in the process. Kennedy has said before that people have told him that the band’s music has given them a feeling of strength. And in turn, that’s led to him feeling something vulnerable—something real.
“Some of [my] most viscerally moving experiences have happened while playing,” he says. “And it’s not about crushing it or doing good. It’s when you understand where there has been … interaction between an audience, people there, and myself and my bandmates and everything’s working and everyone’s feeling something. And a lot of the time it’s in parts of songs that are maybe not negative but difficult. Expressing painful things and feeling that shared is very moving and very hard to describe.
“It’s powerful.”
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