Godspeed You Black Emperor! – Luciferian Towers

Luciferian Towers, released in September 2017, is the sixth studio album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and one of their more overtly political statements. Recorded in Montreal at Hotel2Tango and The Pines, the project was framed with a manifesto calling for systemic change, including an end to borders and the dismantling of the prison-industrial complex. Musically, the album strips away many of the field recordings and extended drones that typified earlier records, focusing instead on direct melodies, shifting dynamics, and tighter compositional forms. Its emergence at a fraught global moment lends urgency to its atmosphere and helps position it as a response to crisis rather than an elegy.

The suite “Undoing a Luciferian Towers” opens the album with a slow waltz that gradually builds into a triumphant orchestral motif, while “Bosses Hang” unfolds in three parts through layered guitars, drums, and strings. The closing “Anthem for No State” is among the record’s most dramatic moments, threading tension, dissonance, and uplift in a climactic arc. Though more restrained than some of the band’s sprawling past works, Luciferian Towers reveals a renewed optimism and force beneath its quiet surface. Over time it has been regarded as a bold evolution in their discography—less about ruin and more about resistance, solidarity, and reconstruction.

Reviews

"Perhaps out of necessity, the group seem more inspired here than they have in a while, and the result is arguably their best work since their 2000 opus Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven." – AllMusic

“Godspeed’s music is undergirded by its musicians' radical leftist politics … [Luciferian Towers] is the band’s most melodic and powerfully positive-sounding album to date.” – Pitchfork

“This doesn’t disappoint. ‘Undoing A Luciferian Towers’ opens proceedings … impossibly slow-moving, thrumming chords and marching drums build tension … until a massive, string-led riff gives us a delirious payoff.” – Record Collector