Ceremony
“In a Spiral”—an early single from *Ceremony*, Phantogram’s fourth LP—was inspired by the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail. “That\'s the feeling you get,” band member Josh Carter tells Apple Music of the presence of social media and the internet in modern life. “It\'s never-ending. You\'re chasing something, and something\'s chasing you. It\'s existential in a lot of ways, and I guess a bit esoteric. That\'s how most of our music is—we keep it in our own world.” Coming in the wake of 2016’s *Three* (whose recording was impacted by the suicide of band member Sarah Barthel’s older sister), *Ceremony* has the sound of a band reveling in dualities, finding comfort in being sealed off together from an outside world that grows more chaotic by the day. For every slice of surrealist, shape-shifting pop (“News Today,” “Mister Impossible”), there is an unclouded declaration of love that’s just as affecting—from the beatific tones of “Into Happiness” to the early moments of “Pedestal,” which Barthel opens with “You could make a hospital lovely.” “We wanted to explain the feeling of giving your entire soul to someone you love and adore, relationship or not, whatever it is,” Barthel says of “Pedestal.” “And that person not even understanding how much love and pain you get from that.”
The duo foreground their most conventional pop sounds on their fourth album, but remain at their best at their strangest.
'Ceremony' assumes the listener wants to be dragged around this disorienting hall of funhouse mirrors without looking into…
After an album that dove headfirst into the pop mainstream and came up feeling a little empty, Phantogram return to form on 2020's Ceremony.
Since breaking out with their indie-tronica and dream pop-tinged debut, Eyelid Moves, in the late '00s, Phantogram have slowly moved on a pa...