Sense of dread pervades Cult of Youth’s Final Days

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      As writers’ settings go, the inside of a New York City holding cell isn’t as ideal as a streetside café in Paris, but Cult of Youth frontman Sean Ragon made the best of an overnight stay at the 99th Precinct by penning some of his strongest lyrics. “In the Garden”, from his band’s recent Final Days LP, is a vivid but weary analysis hinting that God’s green Earth is a prison in which “sheltered men make decisions of man.”

      “I was just bored in this cell with about seven or eight people. You kind of run out of stuff to do there, you know. I just started walking in circles and sang the lyrics in my head,” the guitarist-vocalist tells the Straight over the phone from his Heaven Street Records in Brooklyn.

      Interestingly, he pieced together the track’s blur of postpunk beats and hyperactive acoustic guitar just hours before he was picked up by the police. Though never specifying exactly why he was brought in, Ragon notes that it was for “nothing crazy”.

      “The police in New York will actually take you to jail for nothing. You do some dumb misdemeanour, and the next thing you know you’re spending the night in there,” he proclaims. “We’re not talking some kind of hard-core crime—I don’t want to paint that picture of myself. I’ve never been to actual prison, I’ve only spent the night in jail for some dumb shit.”

      Ragon is relaxed and in good spirits as he discusses Final Days, but notes he was actually a wreck during the two years it took to put the album together. Although short of details, he reports that the time period also included long workdays, hours recording bands like Pharmakon in the store’s backroom recording studio, and various life changes.

      “As this one came through, I’d been working seven days a week. I really had my nose to the ground, so I think that I’m coming off a little more stressed,” he relates. “But I also had some feelings of paranoia and the feeling that my days were numbered. I had a lot of nightmares and was feeling a presence about me.”

      A sense of foreboding filters into Final Days’ foggy opening piece, “Todestrieb”, a dark-arts drum ritual accentuated with paranormal synth moaning and the honk of a trumpet made out of a human leg bone. The dread continues on “Empty Faction”, a manic slice of Bat Cave–fashioned death rock whose images of locked doors and culture wars weigh in on distrust and sociopolitical apathy. This idea returns on the epic “Sanctuary”, which pairs in-the-red feedback with the doomsday-awaiting mantra “Some of us are scared to death of things the rest ignore.”

      While he made it through the recording sessions unscathed, Ragon saw his predictions about his fate come dangerously close to coming true after he was the victim of a vicious assault in Montreal last spring.

      “Some guys were sexually harassing a female friend of mine on the street. I got in the middle of it and I got beaten up pretty bad by these four guys. I got my legs stomped; they shattered my kneecaps,” Ragon relates. “And that was just a few days after the record was finished and handed in. It was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. My whole life got turned upside down.”

      The singer underwent major surgery and currently walks with a cane, but he’s quite optimistic about his situation. Cult of Youth’s latest LP is a hit with tastemakers like Noisey and Pitchfork, and the band just started a three-month global tour. Ragon’s also a recent newlywed and runs a successful business. At this point, his final days are looking pretty far off.

      Cult of Youth plays the Fox Cabaret next Wednesday (January 21).

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