Yves Tumor’s rise to indie rock stardom has felt both obvious and unlikely. Beginning as an experimental noise artist, Tumor (birth name Sean Bowie) didn’t really start writing melodic music until 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love, which merged their now-trademark double-tracked vocals with their nervy electronic arrangements, resulting in live show staples like “Noid” and “Licking an Orchid.” On 2020’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind, Tumor took things a step further, fully reinventing themselves with a daring combination of noise, indie rock, and R&B, and pushed into even glam-ier and more decadent directions on their 2021 follow-up EP The Asymptotical World. 

Stylistically, Praise a Lord Who Chews But Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds), Tumor’s first full-length release since Heaven to a Tortured Mind, feels like a bit of a step backwards. Tumor hasn’t retreated back into full on sound collage, but the guitar-centric fireworks that defined their last two releases have been swapped out for a greater focus on texture and atmospherics, with Tumor’s persona coming across as less louche and more tortured and reflective. There’s nothing on this new album as sexy and explosive as “Kerosene!” or as arena-ready as “Jackie,” but Tumor’s arrangements, when paired with the production of Noah Goldstein (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Yeezus) and mixing of Alan Moulder (Loveless, Siamese Dream) are still a delight for the ears. This is a thick fog of an album that’s as sonically adventurous as anything that’s likely to be released on a major indie label this year.

The first three tracks alone showcase Tumor and company’s range. “God Is a Circle” turns a woman’s panicked gasps into a rhythm track and pairs it with a dense, fuzzy bassline; “Lonely Sewer” lays elegant female vocals over a goth instrumental; while “Meteora Blues,” the closest this album gets to arena rock, shifts between chiming acoustic guitars and crushing, Billy Corgan-style riffs. The record falls into a bit of a lull midway, but Tumor has such a good feel for crescendo (see the midway point of “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood”) that the valleys don’t last too long and the sheer weightiness of the guitar and synth tones are enough to entertain listeners bored by modern indie’s lighter touch. 

Praise a Lord Who Chews is an abstract record, but only just so – all of the feedback and electronic flourishes gravitate around churning basslines and wound up drumbeats that keep the tracks tangible and grounded. It’s dreamlike, but not in the way that a Julee Cruise or Beach House song is dreamlike – instead, Tumor smears their synths and guitars across a dark electronic canvas to create something familiar but surreal. It doesn’t trade as openly in the rock star tropes of Heaven to a Tortured Mind, but it does play with familiar moods and sounds for the purpose of warping and distorting them, and the result is like listening to your favorite alt rock or R&B song during an nightmare or out of body experience. 

That smeared, abstract approach to instrumentation is reflected in the album’s lyrics as well, which often feel fragmented and incomplete (but in an intentional, tantalizing way). In Heaven to a Tortured Mind, Tumor took the sex god archetype of Prince and David Bowie and ratcheted it up to an extreme, heightened state – absence of touch was torture, and sex itself was literally flammable. But Praise a Lord Who Chews is much more inward looking, examining Tumor’s relationship with a God that can be omniscient, silent, and absent – sometimes all at once. “Parody” finds Tumor questioning the persona they’ve inhabited on their last two records (“A parody of a popstar”/”You behaved like a monster”/”Is this all just makeup?”) along with any confidence their indie success may have given them (“What makes you so important?”), while “Echolalia” finds them content to be God’s plaything (“Treat me like a doll”). Fallen angel imagery abounds (Tumor sings about staring “straight into a morning star” on “Meterora Blues”) as does an aversion to sin, at least until “Fear Evil Like Fire” in which Tumor asserts that “Heaven is a place that we all have,” implying that we can all, in a sense, become our own god. 

In fact, if one were to get their interpretation hat on, they could argue that this is an album about Yves Tumor becoming the Yves Tumor of Heaven to a Tortured Mind. After “Fear Evil Like a Fire” comes “Purified by the Fire,” an instrumental that uses the kind of warped funk and soul samples and coarse, twisted synths that are plentiful on Heaven to a Tortured Mind and implies a sort of embrace of the “evil” the previous track warned against. Right after “Purified by the Fire” comes “Ebony Eye,” a big, bursting conclusion to the album that’s easily the most Heaven to a Tortured Mind-style song found on the record and assures the listener that “there’s no cause for shame.” 
But like I said, that’s all interpretation. The beautiful thing about Praise a Lord Who Chews is that such a reading isn’t necessary for you to enjoy it. You can coast along with the eerie sonics and provocative heaven/hell imagery simply for your own listening pleasure with no higher goals or ideas in mind. In an era where music is often judged by its relevance to politics and identity, such an ambiguous approach is refreshing. Sure, one could argue that Yves Tumor’s mere existence as a Black nonbinary artist is political in and of itself – but focusing on such surface level concerns distracts from the music, which is plenty revolutionary in its own right.