The Church —The Hypnogogue (Communicating Vessels)
Photo by Hugh Stewart
“The Hypnogogue” flickers to life in a glittering lattice of guitars, 35 years on but not so different from the trebly foreboding heard in “Reptile” from the landmark Starfish. Steve Kilbey, the only continuing thread between then and now, remains unruffled and nonchalant, his voice shrouded in echoes, reverberating without apparent effort. “Remember the music pulled out of your head,” he breathes in a tone somewhere between a sigh and rafter-tickling anthemry, “Insulating guitars/Reptilian bass, the kick in your face/The snare in your heart.”
The Hypnogogue is the Church’s 26th album, and Kilbey has intimated that it may be the band’s last. It caps a remarkable career trajectory of a band that has always had one foot in the commercial mainstream and the other in an experimental underground. Of the large-scale arena rock icons, The Church has, perhaps, been the most consistent and least embarrassing. Kilbey and his ever-changing band of supporters have mostly avoided the awkward disco flirtations of U2, the brainless euphoria of Coldplay, the drunken idiocies of Oasis. They’ve continued, rather, to be the Church, a source of billowing, guitar-layered, epic drama that is almost never overblown.
Not that they don’t go right up to the edge of rock excess. This album, for instance, follows a narrative arc borrowed from speculative fiction. It’s loosely organized around the story Eros Zeta, the biggest rock star of 2054. To rekindle flagging creative power, Zeta travels to the Hypnogogue, a shadowy interstice between sleeping and waking states. There’s a love interest and climate disaster. It ends badly. It’s complicated. But the good news is that you can have a perfectly enjoyable time listening to The Hypnogogue without knowing any of this.
The tracks are a bit spotty, starting very strong with the epically chilly “Ascendence” and the drum-machined, guitar-splintered “C’est La Vie,” both quite stirring and without bloat. But it dips considerably in the next two tracks, the flabby, generic “I Think I Knew” and the piano ballad “Flickering Lights.” Seriously, every time I come to these tracks, I think, wait, do I really like this record?
But then the title track comes with its instantly recognizable but in no way derivative Church sound and all is well again. Other late-album highlights include “No Other You,” with its warm vintage 1970s guitar solo and its yearning-turns-to-triumphant melodic line, and especially “Antarctica” all spidery guitars and surging, clangorous drum lines.
The Hypnogogue is anything but minimalist. It starts with a big concept, adds dramatic, room-filling rock arrangements and extends for over an hour. And yet, there are very few intervals where you wonder if things might have been better if they were shorter or more pared back. The Church is going out with a bang, not a whimper, and we’re lucky to be here to hear it.
The Church announce North American summer 2026 tour dates
Steve Kilbey and The Church confirm rescheduled US concert dates
The North American leg of The Church’s “The Singles / 1980 – 2025” tour begins on June 5 in Seattle. This run of performances, rescheduled from 2025, occurs during the band’s forty-fifth year of activity. The itinerary concludes in Denver on July 11 and includes newly confirmed dates in Norwalk, Woodstock, Cleveland, Homer, and…
I'll admit it: Thought I admire both their underrated back catalog and new concept album The Hypnogogue (Communicating Vessels), having never seen The Church, I was wary of Steve Kilbey's ability to weave AI-inspired futuristic concepts into the shimmery wistfulness of the band's old songs. Maybe this was the result of having spent so much time recently trying to place myself in the mind of another overly ambitious rock icon. And perhaps my thoughts were unfair considering The Hypnogogue is a cohesive-sounding front-to-back album, stellar independent of its story. But a part of me was nonetheless skeptical of the juxtaposition of heady slow burns with dream pop classics.
Well, immediately after finishing the building "Ascendence", Ian Haug and Ashley Naylor's siren-like guitars leading the way, Kilbey declared that the Australian band was "playing better than ever before," 26 gigs in a row be damned. Indeed, they were so fine-tuned--his perfectly yearning vocals on "Destination", touring drummer Nicholas Meredith's disco beat breakdown on "Metropolis"--that by the time he introduced the concept of The Hypnogogue on ballad "No Other You", you were too, well, hypnotized, by the stadium sounds emanating from a small stage, to take in the plot. Kilbey contextualized The Hypnagogue's songs within the album's universe whenever he introduced them, but he did so non-linearly, as if each song was its own vignette. "Flickering Lights" sees the narrator hearing a nostalgic song in a cab, represented live by Jeffrey Cain's washy synths and Haug and Naylor's chiming guitars. "Antarctica", meanwhile, is named after the motherland of the main character, and the band's Pink Floyd-like, deliberate, effects-heavy prog funk conjured the feeling of being so cold you can't think straight. "Albert Ross"'s namesake in the fictional world is a disappeared guitar tech, and what better way to pay tribute to the lost soul than for Kilbey to thank the band's road crew, especially because they had to bring a mandolin just for that song?
Of course, The Church's hits were highlights, from "Hotel Womb" and "Fly", both enveloped by voluminous synths, to a lounge-like version of "Under the Milky Way" and stomping "Grind". But I was blown away by many of their deep cuts. During a mid-concert mini acoustic set, they nailed "Old Coast Road", a gorgeously jangly highlight from 2014's Further/Deeper. Meredith's motorik drumming both propelled and offered a welcome contrast to the otherwise beatific "C'est La Vie". Kilbey's dry, spoken delivery on "Second Bridge" recalled the depth of Jarvis Cocker. And "Tantalized", sans the theatrical horns of its studio version, was a tried and true monochromatic banger, clattering drums and scratchy, early 80's-The Edge-like guitars splitting eardrums in a venue over four times smaller than the theaters The Church were playing earlier in the year.
Ask any casual music fan about The Church, and they'll think of the band who made "Under the Milky Way". It is a great song; the moment the synthetic guitar solo meant to sound like bagpipes comes in, is one of the greatest in 80's rock. I posit, though, that their best song is "Reptile", whose revolving Marty Willson-Piper riff is the earworm of all earworms. This lineup, along with appropriate green and orange strobe lighting, stuck the landing, the dual guitar interplay shining in a matchup of stop-start stabs behind Kilbey's whispered sneer of a vocal turn. It was the emotional climax of the show, prepping you for the all-out closing cacophony jam of "You Took", and one that reminded you that a band in their fifth decade sounds like they could share a stage with some of today's best post-punk bands, even if their sound is meant to evoke noises of the past.
