Holy Sons, the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Emil Amos (Grails, Om, Lilacs & Champagne) has announced the new album Puritan Themes, out October 31st. Along with the album’s announcement, Holy Sons has shared first two album singles, the effervescent title track “Puritan Themes” and the allegorical album centerpiece “Chain Gang”.
On the singles, Amos notes:
“‘Puritan Themes’ is largely based on the street/fluid way The Band plays together… but faked by one person overdubbing alone (also recorded in the parlor room of a farm similar to the way they recorded ‘Music From Big Pink’ and ‘The Basement Tapes’). ‘Chain Gang’ is an existential fairy tale built off of American legends like Cool Hand Luke and John Henry. It’s the heart of the political stance embedded inside Puritan Themes, recalling Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle with its final lines ‘A thousand idiot’s eyes are focused on the one diseased prize’.”
Puritan Themes is Amos’ 17th album under the Holy Sons moniker, his 4th for Thrill Jockey Records and a tentpole album in his wide-ranging output. Puritan Themes’ relaxed aura is focused through a laid-back west coast 70’s lens, injecting Amos’ wry wit and tinges of darkness into lush songs that drift like dreamy, featherlight clouds. It is a record that knowingly, barely fits into the modern world. When mixing the record in Chicago throughout summer of 2025, every day Amos would skate through Douglass Park listening to 70’s AM radio and doze off at night to early Bee Gees interviews. The earliest concept of the record was based around single “Chain Gang”. Amos explains: “It’s an imaginary take on if Cat Stevens had smoked a ton of salvia and taken a much darker route within the world of dense, story-telling songwriting.”
Everything is recorded, performed and mixed by Amos. Amos has been a beacon in the world of home-production for decades now, a progenitor and godfather of modern bedroom-pop and one-man-orchestras, making dense, organic sounding arrangements primarily on his own. His free-wheeling, adventurous spirit as a producer mirrors his cerebral and sprawling landmark podcast “Drifter’s Sympathy,” which feels inexorably tied to his practice of home recording. The album features Kelly Pratt (David Byrne, M Ward) playing and arranging the horns on “Chain Gang”. In addition to playing guitar and drums which Amos is most known for playing live, Puritan Themes features all the staple instruments of Holy Sons: mellotron, lap steel, various drum machines and the Akai MPC sampler. Notable is Amos’ obsessive and unusual approach to mixing, repeatedly bouncing down instruments and applying pitch-bending or re-rooming plug-ins that obscure the original sound sources.
