Tell Me Your Dream

CEREMONY — 2026

“CEREMONY channel hardcore, post punk, and anarcho fury into one of their most complete records in years.”

CEREMONY have never been a band you can pin down, and after 21 years that restlessness has basically become their whole identity. Tell Me Your Dream is their seventh record, ten songs that tear by in just over half an hour, and it reaches straight back to the anarcho punk of Discharge and Crass that shaped these guys when they were teenagers. This time they handed much of the record over to producer John Reis, the man behind Rocket from the Crypt and Hot Snakes, who last sat behind the board for them on 2015’s The L-Shaped Man. This was the right call. The album makes a seamless jump from blunt California hardcore into cold gray post punk and back without losing its footing. The guitars have a raw quality, like they were tracked in one furious take and nobody bothered to clean them up, and I mean that as a compliment. At times the band locks into a groove that feels surprisingly Clash like, especially on “Madness.”

What keeps the whole thing from feeling like a nostalgia trip is Ross Farrar, who sings like he is arguing with himself in real time. He drags the huge outside stuff, war and money and the general rot of things, up against his own private wreckage, and the record is stronger for refusing to choose a side. There is real anger running through it, but it never flattens into a lecture, which is the trap a lot of political punk stumbles into. By the end of this album you will think the band sounds locked in and genuinely dangerous, like five people who only recently realized they have nothing left to prove and decided to swing at everything in front of them. The result is a record that checks a lot of boxes while keeping a sharp edge from Farrar’s vocals all the way through the pounding rhythm section.