Osmia made ‘Cult Country’ in an unheated Maine studio, racing the first hard freeze. You can sense that urgency in how the record is built. Six songs, nearly thirty-two minutes, and no interest in decoration. Each track seems to know exactly how long it needs to stay in the room. The band began in 2014 as Leo Coronado’s solo project in Portland, Oregon, then grew into a trio that has since settled in Midcoast Maine. Coronado handles vocals, guitar, and samples. Eric Kempke covers bass, Bass VI, guitar, electronics, and backing vocals, and he also sat at the mixing board. Jason Dean plays drums and percussion. Serge Vladimiroff adds live bass and additional recording with Lynda Mandolyn guesting on one song.
That personnel list matters because the record sounds like people who have spent years learning how to lean on one another. A band that records itself, in its own space, answers to nobody’s schedule but the weather’s. Whatever rough edges survive in the performances read as choices, or at least as honest accidents kept on purpose. Opening with ‘Asesina’ at nearly seven minutes is a statement of patience. It asks you to settle in before it asks you for anything, and it sets a tone of unease that the rest of the record never really lets go of. The low end carries a lot of the weight here, and with Kempke’s Bass VI and Vladimiroff’s live bass both in the picture, the bottom of these songs has real depth. Dean’s drumming doesn’t show off. He plays like someone who understands that restraint can hit harder than force.
‘Disappeared (I Don’t Wanna Be)’ follows, and it’s where the album’s human stakes come into focus. Mandolyn’s voice joins Coronado’s, and the shift in texture matters. A second voice changes what a song is about. Suddenly the plea isn’t one person’s, and the title stops sounding like private dread and starts sounding like something shared among people who have watched neighbors vanish. That reading isn’t a stretch. The band has said the record grows out of surviving a time of greed, fascism, racism, misogyny, and the psychological torture of marginalized communities, and proceeds from the release go to Community Relief Fund Maine, a BIPoC-led mutual aid group supporting families whose members have been taken by ICE or Border Patrol in Wabanakiek (Maine). The music doesn’t need that context to land, but the context gives it a spine.
‘It Breeds Inside You’ stretches past seven minutes and takes its time with a subject that deserves it. Rot, complicity, the way a bad idea settles in a body and starts giving orders: the title suggests all of it, and the band’s slow, deliberate pacing lets the idea sink in rather than sprint past. Then the title track, ‘Cult Country,’ the longest piece on the record at eight and a half minutes. Naming an album after its biggest song is a bold move, and a risky one. It pays off because the band treats the length as space to think, not as a stage for indulgence. Samples and electronics, the parts of the sound most easily overlooked, give the song an eerie, half-broadcast quality, like a signal from a country you recognize but wish you didn’t.
‘Ultradeath’ is the shortest song here, just under four minutes, and its brevity lands like a slammed door after so much slow-building weight. Coming after the sprawl of the title track, it’s a necessary jolt. ‘Tired Sac’ closes things at over six minutes, and the title alone is a small act of dark humor, the sort of wry, worn-out joke people make when anger has been running too long to stay hot. It’s a fitting place to end. Nothing resolves. The record simply stops, and you’re left sitting in the quiet it makes.
What lingers is the sense of conviction behind all of it. Plenty of protest music announces its politics and forgets to be music. Osmia does the opposite: they build the room first, then let the anger and grief move around inside it. ‘Cult Country’ is not an easy album, nor does it want to be. But it is an honest one, made by three people and a few trusted collaborators who needed to say something before the cold shut the door.
Learn more links:
Strange Mono
Community Relief Fund Maine
