Ted Hearne’s latest album, Farming, doesn’t so much begin as burst open. Auto-tuned choirs shimmer. Euphoric beats gleam. Yet the brilliance feels unstable, a smile stretched taut. The manic joy is beautiful camouflage. Hearne’s music examines hyperpop ecstasy as a delivery system for dread.
For all its stylistic whiplash — country guitars, powerful choral fanfare, strange harmonies, fragments of R&B — Farming is remarkably unified. It finds coherence in emotion and conviction. Each moment is bound by the same question: How can something so dazzling carry such unease? Hearne composes from inside that contradiction, crafting songs that seduce with surface shimmer, while barely concealing the grinning menace beneath.
Hearne, a versatile American musician, singer, and composer, structures the record like a miniature opera, tracing capitalism’s faiths and failures. Each track is an aria, giving voice to a different believer in the myths of progress. “We’re Back” plays the overture, a radiant promise of progress that teeters into overload. “Microwork” pairs a wide-eyed zealot with a mechanized choir peddling the dignity of gig-work and digital labor. “Everything That We Do Well” turns Jeff Bezos’s corporate rhetoric into a larger-than-life pop ballad. Its sincerity feels manufactured… and weirdly moving for it.
“What Are Greens,” built from a real food-marketing slogan, turns vending-machine promises into techno-absurdist comedy. In “Country,” folk guitar crashes against electronic noise, an aural metaphor for conquest, each laying claim to the same patch of sonic land.
Across the album, Hearne pushes from individual intimacy to collective delirium. The final track, “We’re Actively Monitoring,” layers fragmented pandemic-era slogans such as “taking steps to keep our community safe” and “we’ve updated our delivery options” over sugar-rush pop beats. Reassurance becomes hysteria. Brief synth interludes offer respite, then are swallowed by the frenzy. It is sublimely exhilarating and frightening right to the end.
Farming was released on Deathbomb Arc Records, a label known for experimental hip-hop and noise rock. The album brings together artists from radically different worlds to create something that feels both critically rigorous and artistically volatile. Farming was created in collaboration with The Crossing, a Philadelphia-based chamber choir known for fearless new-music commissions. Their expressive power gives the album its backbone. Their sound moves between faith and distortion. One moment, unified radiance; the next, a digital swarm. Hearne treats them like a Greek chorus for the twenty-first century, sometimes complicit, sometimes skeptical, never entirely trustworthy. Hearne uses their focused polish to expose the unease behind perfection, then lets that sound unravel.
This may be Hearne’s most audacious synthesis yet. The production on Farming is astonishingly detailed. Every sound feels sculpted, from the glint of an auto-tuned vowel to the grain of a distorted synth. Despite the chaos, the mix stays transparent, even at its densest.
That transparency is the point. It lets the contradictions show through — the fervor and the fracture. Rather than sermonize, it dramatizes the contradictions: the pleasure of shiny surfaces, the terror of what they hide. In the end, Hearne leaves us with music that is both ecstatic and anxiously erratic, a mirror of the systems it confronts. It’s an album worth hearing. Loud.
