POISON RUIN Announce US Tour Following 'Harvest' Album

Since the release of their highly lauded Spring album Harvest, Poison Ruin have toured continuously, including various US dates and a sold out European / UK debut tour earlier this year. Now they announce another Fall US run around their performance at Gonerfest in September. Highlights also include NYC's Union Pool at the top of next month, Nashville, DC, NOLA and others. See below for a full list of dates and tickets are on sale now.

Evoking a rich tapestry of ice-caked forests, peasant revolts, and silent knights, Poison Ruin stab at the pulsing heart of what it means to live under the permanent midnight of contemporary life. Harvest gazes at the world with a sense of grave seriousness, its stare softened only by the alluring seduction of a dream world’s open-ended possibility.

These songs move with a type of uncanny confidence, assembling an array of references to past styles and sensibilities that collapse in on one another, congealing into a truly unique sonic landscape. 

Poison Ruin have constructed a fantasy world of a better future. They do not flinch in the face of darkness or peddle in empty utopian gestures, but rather harness the energies of revenge and comradery to stoke the desire for a better world made material.

With Harvest, Poison Ruin aligns their sonic palette to their godless, medieval-inflected aesthetic symbolism, creating a record which strikes with an assured sense of blackened harmony.

“I’ve always found fantasy tropes to be incredibly evocative,” vocalist/guitarist Mac Kennedy notes, “that said, even though they are a set of symbols that seem to speak to most people of our generation, they are often either apolitical or co-opted for incredibly backwards politics.”

With Harvest’s lyrics and imagery, Kennedy reworks fantasy imagery as a series of totems for the downtrodden, stripping it of its escapist tendencies and retooling it as a rich metaphor for the collective struggle over our shared reality: “Instead of knights in shining armor and dragons, it’s a peasant revolt,” he explains, “I’m all for protest songs, but with this band I’ve found that sometimes your message can reach a greater audience if you imbue it with a certain interactive, almost magical realist element.” 

These are not superficial or self-aggrandizing political statements. Rather, Poison Ruin stares into the abyss of present-day life with a sober and empathetic outlook, portraying our cracked reality as a complex and difficult to parse miasma of competing desires.

Philadelphia’s Poison Ruin first emerged in April of 2020 with their eponymous EP, which was followed shortly by a second eponymous EP the following February, both self-released. While they share a certain affinity for rough-around-the-edges, lo-fidelity stones with their compatriots Devil Master and Sheer Mag, Poison Ruin wants things bleaker.

The up-tempo guitar heroics of their first two EPs (which were collectively released as a S/T LP in February of 2021) have been dragged through the trenches, emerging as a heavy morass of breathless gloom. With Harvest, Poison Ruin have constructed a richly chilling fable out of modern living. Their tale is as lurid as it is seductive, as much a promising fantasy as it is a dreary portrait of reality itself.

Poison Ruin Live Dates:

Sep 03: Brooklyn, NY - Union Pool
Sep 11: Matverkstan - Malmo, SE
Sep 12: Beta - Copenhagen, DK 
Sep 13: HUS7 - Stockholm, SE
Sep 14: Blitz - Oslo, NO
Sep 17: Garage - London, UK
Sep 27: Richmond, VA - The Warehouse
Sep 28: Raleigh, NC - Kings
Sep 29: Nashville, TN - DRKMTTR
Sep 30: Memphis, TN - Gonerfest
Oct 01: New Orleans, LA - Gasa Gasa
Oct 03: Knoxville, TN - Pilot Light
Oct 04: Louisville, KY - Mag Bar
Oct 05: Cincinnati, OH - Northside Tavern
Oct 06: Atlanta, GA - The Earl
Oct 08: Washington, DC - Songbyrd

Photo By Cecil Shang Whaley

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