Starting his career as a member of San Francisco-based experimental black metal outfit BOTANIST, contributing hammered dulcimer and bass for their acclaimed 2017’s Collective: The Shape of He to Come, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Dylan Neal initially split his time with BOTANIST and his solo recording project THIEF, with which he has released 2016’s Thieves Hymn in D Minor, 2019’s Map of Lost Keys, 2021’s The 16 Deaths of My Master and the Cicatrix/Diamond Brush split album with BOTANIST and 2024’s Bleed Memory.
Neal’s fifth THIEF album, Sermons from the Pit is slated for a November 27. 2026 release through Prophecy Productions. Reportedly, Neal’s most ambitious and uncompromising effort to date, Sermons from the Pit socially pairs the project’s manipulated liturgical choirs with his self-described and self-developed “Cathedral Clipping” production technique, in which reverberant sounds are reportedly overdriven through successive gain stages to produce dense, harmonic distortion, feedback and cavernous textures. Sonically, Sermons from the Pit is THEIF as its most visceral and forceful: ethereal choirs are paired with pummeling rhythms and towering walls of sound. The result is something both intimate and unsettling. Neal describes the album as “transmissions from an unspeakable place”—a descent beneath the surface of consciousness into the murkiness of the subconscious and where belief takes shape.
Sermons from the Pit’s first single “Moon and Kill” is a bruising and anthemic blend of industrial, goth, trap and New Wave featuring skittering tweeter and roofer rattling beats, scorching synths and guitars paired with rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses. The song moves through furious mosh pit-inducing rage, melancholy and meditative introspection and acceptance throughout its expansive structure.
“Sermons from the Pit moves through stages of frenetic energy which are tempered by sullen, meditative moments of respite. “’Moon and Kill’ is a microcosm of that, encapsulating the album’s broader thematic movement from rage to despair and acceptance,” THEIF creative mastermind Dylan Neal says. “The ending is one of my favorite moments on the album, where the vocals are just kind of cooing over a time-stretched organ and choral sample. The track’s voice oscillates between executioner and victim. At the risk of stealing the listener’s meaning away, I’ll speak of the track by saying that when love and trust collapse, the same anger and disbelief experienced by murderers and saints alike are experienced. Which implement do you choose? Weapon or forgiveness?”
The accompanying video was shot, edited and features visual effects by Dylan Neal and is fittingly haunted, while depicting what appears to be an execution before its eerie coda.