Last year, Agriculture, the Los Angeles band who call their style “ecstatic black metal,” released a hugely promising self-titled album and ended up on our list of the year’s best new bands. They also went out on tour with their Flenser labelmates Chat Pile, but apparently that venture didn’t go so well. Today, Agriculture announced plans to release a new EP called “Living Is Easy,” but it must be a posthumous record. As the video for the title track makes clear, all eight members of Agriculture and Chat Pile died in a brutal band-on-band back-alley brawl. Damn.

Living Is Easy, Agriculture’s new EP, is being compiled with their 2022 EP The Circle Chant as a full LP. The band’s song “Living Is Easy” is a gorgeous seven-minute rager, so at least it makes a nice final testament. In a press release, the band, blissfully unaware of their own looming fate, says that the song is “centered around a story from one of the Buddha’s past lives: On a walk in a forest, the Buddha came upon a hungry family of tigers. He realized that they would die if they didn’t eat, so he lay down and let them eat his body. He was devoured with a smile on his face.”

The members of Agriculture, however, did not die with smiles on their faces, as the “Living Is Easy” video makes clear. Instead, the clip, from director Sam Blakesberg, starts out looking like a standard bands-on-tour video — live footage, landscapes filmed from van windows, backstage antics. But the Chat Pile pranks evidently get to be too much, and we see the two bands locked in mortal combat — stabbing each other, bludgeoning each other, forcing each other to smoke their own severed fingers like cigars. Honestly, Blakesberg should be ashamed of himself for letting all this carnage happen.

Below, check out this gory and tragic music video, as well as the Living Is Easy / The Circle Chant tracklist and — hold on, this can’t be right — Agriculture’s upcoming tour dates? Must be a hologram thing.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Living Is Easy”
02 “Being Eaten By A Tiger”
03 “In The House Of Angel Flesh”
04 “When You Were Born”
05 “The Circle Chant”
06 “Salt”
07 “How To Keep Cool”
08 “The Circle Chant, Pt. 2”

TOUR DATES:
3/24 – Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon
3/27 – San Diego, CA @ Che Cafe
4/10 – Toronto, ON @ Monarch Tavern
4/11 – Montreal, QC @ Cabaret Foufounes Electriques
4/12 – Medford, MA @ Deep Cuts
4/13 – New York, NY @ Saint Vitus
4/14 – Philadelphia, PA @ MilkBoy
4/20 – Tilburg, Netherlands @ Roadburn Festival

The Living Is Easy / The Circle Chant double EP is out 53 on the Flenser.