Western Massachusetts band Landowner play abrasively-clean minimalist punk. Singer Dan Shaw started Landowner in 2016, writing and recording the project's debut Impressive Almanac with a practice amp and a laptop drum machine. Shaw's initial concept was a made-up genre called “weak d-beat”, meant to sound intentionally absurd “as if Antelope were reading the sheet music of Discharge”. When Shaw joined with his current bandmates in 2017, they translated these early experiments in restraint, minimalism, and caricatured hardcore as a live band. This provided Landowner with its own unique set of blueprints: the guitars “slap hard” without using any distortion or effects, the rhythm section is tight, fast, and repetitious, and the song structures make space for lyrics that reflect on the global systems and dark absurdities our lives are tangled in. Comparisons could be made to The Fall, Lungfish, or Uranium Club, but across their five albums, they make it clear: Landowner just sound like Landowner.

Assumption is the band's fifth album. Sonically, it captures the vibrancy and intensity of their live performances. Vocalist Shaw, guitarists Elliot Hughes and Jeff Gilmartin, bassist and backup vocalist Josh Owsley, and drummer Josh Daniel sound comfortably tight, deploying their well-established unique sound in service of twelve compositions with a focused lyrical theme. After honing the songs through a year or two of live shows, the band went to rural Bradford, Vermont to record with Brett Nagafuchi at Mt Din studio. The album was mixed by Brett and mastered by Carl Saff.

The album title “Assumption” encapsulates the album's multi-layered themes. We make assumptions, taking in information online through an overload of decontextualized snippets and headlines, and then quickly form conclusions, or we allow artificial intelligence to do the thinking for us. The word itself also evokes “The Assumption”, the belief in Catholicism that the Virgin Mary, rather than dying the regular way, was “assumed” into heaven physically- her living body was carried up as a miraculous event. Through the album's lyrical imagery and artwork, those meanings swirl together-- you sit stubbornly believing in your assumptions, to the extent that you see yourself as untouchable, chosen, and unquestionably in the right. The next layer then, and perhaps the more interesting one, is the inner dialogue that emerges as Shaw reflects on his own fears and comes to the powerful and healing realization that these too might be based on nothing more than mere assumptions.

The album's initial themes are established right out of the gate on the opening track “Assumption”, and are explored from various angles throughout the album. The jarringly contradicting refrain of “PRAY for the Environment” reads like a bumper sticker slogan that assumes nothing can or should be done to correct humanity's course. “Linear Age” views the history of civilization like a computer game, and depicts how extraction, exploitation and waste have been placed on a pedestal. The protagonist in “Enemy Attack” reads any difference of opinion as a personal assault. “Bow to your Superior” suggests a surrender to the authority of artificial intelligence.

As the album progresses, the deeper thread begins to emerge. The tension that's present in Landowner's taut, high-energy minimalism becomes the expression of an anxiety around the decline of Earth's life-giving capacity, the instinct to ensure the well-being of our children, and the deep fears that arise when these combine. The hard-hitting “Rival Males” describes how the isolated nuclear family unit is used in American capitalism as a way of cultivating desperation, incentivizing you to compete and work harder so that the enterprise can reap the benefits. Named like a church hymn (where the first lyric is arbitrarily used as the title), the opening lines depict Christ as a savage, ape-like beast being released like an attack animal on command; religion weaponized to scare you into being fruitful, obedient and productive. The quieter “Uninhabitable” alternates between two scenes- in one, a frontier family has extracted Earth's last resources, in the other, the grim reaper calmly prepares a picnic and invites you to join him. The song depicts death in a weirdly funny, quietly playful way, suggesting something of the naturalness of cycles of life and death and re-birth; but with unease. The more startling “Unboxing” pushes this idea into a wilderness of absurdity and fear, proposing that we are faced with the “new environmental contamination wilderness”. The penultimate song “Slippery Abyss” is set in a dark medieval fantasy universe where an ecologist who recognizes the alarming state of the natural landscape essentially finds himself lost in the catacombs.

Just when pessimism might cement its grip, the album's final song, “Normal Returns to Normal”, reveals the “assumption” to be just that-- only an assumption; the true events end up unfolding differently. The fog of doom lifts and something unexpected is revealed. According to Shaw: “As the album progresses, I am increasingly addressing my own assumptions, specifically the assumption that the world is doomed and my kids will experience increasing suffering. Ultimately through this album, and especially on the last song, I end up reminding myself that this view is indeed itself an assumption, or is at least simplistic, and I am not an all-knowing prophet. This insight has been deeply valuable to me, in learning to cope with personal-level crises and anxieties, or more global-scale worries. Things usually turn out differently than I assume, and that's a simple but deeply valuable thing to realize.”

Shaw's lyrics have often reflected on our relationship with the built and natural environment, perspective gained from his day job as a landscape architect designing public spaces. Now with fatherhood in the mix, his reflections have evolved with an added sense of connection and urgency. Hughes, Gilmartin, Daniel and Owsley's performances use abrasively-clean minimalism to create sonic environments of focus, tension, hypnotic-ness, and surprise. Assumption is the sound of a band that established its own musical identity and has reached a place of tightness with an ease gained from years of playing together, sounding mechanically precise and at the same time fully human. It may be the band's most cohesive and fully realized work to date.