Empires don’t collapse so much as they decompose, layer by layer, leaving behind artefacts that only make sense once gone. Empire of Liberty, the fourth album from MEINSCHAFT, arrives timed to the 250th birthday of the United States with the precision of an awkward joke. It isn’t a celebration, nor is it a takedown, but something closer to an exhumation that sifts through the wreckage of post-war American confidence to see what’s still humming underneath.
Empire of Liberty is the work of Evan Lipson and Evmh, the duo operating as MEINSCHAFT from their base in Southern Appalachia. Lipson’s history runs through two notable outfits, Normal Love and Satanized, both of which trade in a similarly unruly, genre-agnostic language. Evmh’s background is stranger and more singular: for nearly 150 episodes, they hosted Evcast, an internet radio show that paired obscure music from around the world with specific perfumes and fragrances. An exercise that helps explain the sensor quality where texture and atmosphere carry as much weight as melody.
The album was recorded, mixed, and produced by the duo themselves in East Tennessee across a six-year span, from 2019 to 2025, and mastered by Alex Nagle. It’s a record built patiently, with its density of detail managing to feel unrushed. The guest list is extensive and eclectic: FKA ICE provides vocals across several tracks, Greg Kelley contributes trumpet to ‘Lux Æterna, Part One’, Jonathan Moritz brings soprano saxophone to its companion piece, Brandon Seabrook adds electric guitar to ‘Gay Parade’, and Mike Pride handles drums and percussion on two of the album’s most physically driving cuts. ‘Haints & Sinners’ is handed over almost entirely to the free-improvising trio Never of Ben Bennett, Zach Darrup, and Jack Wright whose singing saw, electrocuted guitar, and tenor saxophone tip the track into something closer to collapsing carnival music than anything resembling a song. The record is released via Discriminate Audio, timed deliberately to land on America’s semiquincentennial.
Sonically, Empire of Liberty refuses to sit still. Across fifteen tracks it moves through trip-hop, gothic electronica, drum’n’bass pulse, country twang, free improvisation, and passages that brush up against neofolk without ever committing to it (hauntology as a working method rather than an aesthetic costume). Opener ‘Freezing Rain’, featuring FKA ICE, sets the tone: almost ethereal, almost neofolk, but never quite settling into either. Its symbolism, a Star of David logo sitting alongside the album’s tongue-in-cheek title, announcing an album that’s aware of the ideological minefield it’s walking into and unwilling to simplify it for anyone’s comfort.
‘Lux Æterna, Part One’ and ‘Part Two’ unfold as a slow-building diptych, trip-hop rhythms gathering weight beneath Kelley’s trumpet and Moritz’s soprano sax. ‘Gay Parade’ is the record’s clearest structural nod to Tom Waits, it’s a lurching, theatrical gait that Seabrook’s guitar work only deepens. ‘French Erection’ tilts into gothic electronica proper, while ‘Event Horizon’ pushes toward drum’n’bass territory, its rhythmic urgency undercut by an odd, persistent hum that never resolves into anything comfortable.
The record’s strongest run arrives mid-album. ‘Biting the Hand’ pairs industrial-leaning guitar work with an unmistakably country delivery, its moody string sections and raw samples pushing against driving, synthetic percussion. It’s a genuinely disorienting combination that lands as one of the album’s high points. ‘Remember to Remember (You Must Die)’ strips things back to delicate strumming and baritone vocal, a hushed lead-in to ‘Anacalypto’, where croaky, half-military vocal cadences surface through mysterious, suggestive strumming and spare synth pulses. ‘Pneumatic Waltz’, largely instrumental, rides a driving rhythm under mild electronic shading. It’s hard not to read this as a metaphor for the machinery of the country itself, grinding forward on momentum alone.
‘Mother & Son’ is the album’s emotional peak: female choral harmonies drift beneath a gothic-leaning vocal, lending the track a mystical undercurrent reminiscent of Rose McDowall‘s work, while its driving epicness carries a tenderness not far removed from Current 93‘s more expansive material. ‘Haints & Sinners’ follows with a hard swerve into quirky, synthesised carnival music, its free-improv guest spot from Never pulling the album toward its most unhinged corner before ‘The Fall’ and the hidden closer, ‘For Francis Scott Key’ (a CD-only bonus tucked away on the album’s limited physical run) bring things to a close on unsettled ground.
MEINSCHAFT have described Empire of Liberty as reimagining the sound of American empire from the height of its post-war power through its long, uneven decline. By their own account, a perfumed love letter to Third Culture, USA style. That framing matters, because the album resists the easy sneer. It isn’t interested in scoring points against the idea of America so much as it’s interested in what’s left once the myth-making stops working. MEINSCHAFT hold their contradictions in view rather than resolving them, letting irony and sincerity, decay and tenderness, sit in the same track without cancelling each other out. This is a record that trusts its listener to sit with ambiguity, at a moment when very little contemporary music seems willing to.
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Stream on Bandcamp
Released on Discriminate Audio
Mastered by Alex Nagle
Artwork by Alex Hampshire
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