Land Lion’s Hymns For End Times is a protest album that truly meets the moment

Land Lion. // photo credit Bailey Gabbert

Say what you will about the modern hellscape in which we currently live, but the predictions regarding the artistic response to everything have been pretty incorrect. Back in November of 2024, my social media was flooded with various iterations of “We’re gonna have protest music again, and it’s gonna be impressive as hell!” and yeah, no, that did not really happen.

It seems that when you’re trying to make sure you don’t lose what half-assed health insurance you’ve managed to acquire while also keeping the lights on and some modicum of food in your belly while working multiple jobs makes it hard to foment revolutionary thought.

That said, ideas can only percolate for so long before they must come out in some form or another. Maybe that’s why it’s taken well over a year and a half for Land Lion’s debut album, Hymns for End Times, to come out after frontman Ben Wendt’s debut single under the moniker—“Ribs”—dropped in January of 2024.

After a brief introduction, the album properly kicks off with “Form & Void,” which is a capital ‘P’ Protest Song. The line, “The fear just stays within us until it’s something we can’t hide,” is something of a mission statement for the band and this album, with a sound that’s both introspective and joyously exuberant. The storytelling owes a lot to Colin Meloy and The Decemberists, being both upbeat and sad, loaded with horns and big choruses. Much like the Decemberists or Beirut, the bridge from sing-along land to, “Oh, this is about some serious shit,” is a short one, but well-constructed.

Speaking with Land Lions’ Wendt over Zoom, he immediately acknowledges this.

“Broadly speaking, to me, this is absolutely a protest album,” says Wendt. “There are moments that are protesting various things, but I view it–and the band views it–as a protest album, but we’re trying to be subtle in ways, too.”

As Wendt comes from a punk rock background and is all for flipping tables and flipping the bird, he thinks that to build coalitions, sometimes your protest has to be a little bit more subtle than that.

“In a lot of ways, it’s an album about the internet,” the frontman continues, explaining that while the Decemberists and Beirut are big influences, there are other things that greatly affected Hymns for End Times, such as the film Everything Everywhere All at Once and Bo Burnham’s special Inside, helping to blur the lines between music and comedy.

“If we’re writing about the internet, you have to make it maximalist. You have to go for it.”

Land Lion is a ten-piece band with a horn section, Wendt notes, so they tried really hard to ensure every song had its own sonic identity. They wanted the album to be a cohesive piece, but also wanted listeners to note which songs feature prominent keyboards or none at all.

“I think the thing we kept asking ourselves when we were trying to accomplish that was, ‘What is special about this song?’” Wendt recalls. “’What is the magic trick that we’re trying to pull off with this song?’ and then build out from that to give each one its own identity and purpose.”

A good example of how the internet of it all combines with a unique musical identity is the mid-album “Algorithm and Blues,” whose Jocelyn Nixon/Creepy Jingles-like title pairs well with the song’s punk rock, angry-but-fun vibes.

“There is some very real anger in there,” acknowledges Wendt. “I’m furious at capitalism and the economy and all of that, but yeah–I try to have fun with it at the same time. The whole team does.”

Calling Land Lion a team is quite an accurate assessment. The whole thing began as Wendt’s previous band, The Way Way Back, was winding down in late 2023 and early 2024.

“It really started with me saying, ‘I have these particular songs and these stories, and I just wanna play ’em out full band,’” explains the frontman.

Land Lion. // photo credit Jeremy Nathan

What would happen was that Land Lion would add a keyboardist for a show, and then Wendt would say, “Hey, if you’d like to keep being in the band, you can be.” The frontman describes it as “a real stone soup situation where, all of a sudden, we just looked around, and there were 10 of us, and it almost happened by accident.”

Wendt writes the songs and then uploads an early demo version to Dropbox, along with a lead sheet with all the chord changes and the lyrics, telling his bandmates, “Hey, show up to the next rehearsal knowing the song and make some choices.”

They’ll then see what works, playing it through a couple of times, after which they’ll record it and give it a listen to see if those arrangements make sense.

“Really, I just challenge everybody to put their fingerprints all over it,” says Wendt. He makes sure that he’s proud of the bones of a song when he brings it to the band, but afterward, Wendt then tries to have no ego about it: “’You guys make it your song now.’”

Hymns for End Times mostly happened over the past year. While Wendt notes that Land Lion had a couple of the songs already written, as obviously some of the subject matter being addressed was in the air already, but then the 2024 election happened.

“I think it’s one of those things where most of the people in my life are not happy with how the country’s going, even if the guy they voted for won,” he says. “I just saw this totally ubiquitous sense of doom amongst my friends–and I was battling it, too.”

As a collective in their group chat, Land Lion said, “Let’s like actually make an album about this. Let’s legitimately commit to it.” Wendt says the band hit warp speed on it and immediately started pre-production, with tracking beginning back in late March/early April, and recording all summer long.

“Maybe it sounds a little bit cheesy, but I really think all of us felt like we needed to make this record for ourselves and then hoped that people would connect,” Wendt says. “It’s nice when you’ve got a band as big as we do, ’cause it’s not just a band, it’s also a focus group. We just really felt compelled to get these stories out there.”

Land Lion’s release show for Hymns for End Times is Saturday, December 13, at the Rino with Jack Summers celebrating the release of his album, Konza Prairie Hymnal, and special guest Jeremy Nathan. Details on that show here.