Premiering yesterday (Monday, 8 September, 2025), ‘Strangers of Non-Being’ is the latest darkly psychedelic video-single from Washington D.C. post-punk experimentalists Zabus. The song is the second video-single to be lifted from latest album Whores of Holyrood (Saccharine Underground, August 2025): the fifth full-length Zabus album in less than two years.
Founder and frontman Jeremy Moore says of the track:
“With ‘Strangers of Non-Being’, I wanted to convey what I believe are the two primary contributors to systemic generational discrimination and oppression—human instinct and established societal power dynamics. In this reality, the power dynamic has been perpetually lopsided in one single direction. In an alternate reality, if the roles were switched, who’s to say it would be any different? The irony is that a human’s capacity for evil is the grand unifier beyond religion, race, ethnicity, or gender identification… Yet a human’s capacity for kindness in the face of primal instinct connects us in a transcendental way, and has the power to destroy fear-based barriers permanently. The choice is ours…”
Premiering on Post-punk.com, Alice Teeple described ‘Strangers of Non-Being’ and its video as:
“…a hallucinatory video single that feels less like a performance and more like an incantation…. an unflinching song of confrontation, where Moore’s voice inhabits both beast and witness, and the music itself sounds like the sound of a country standing on its own fractured threshold. The track unfurls as a séance of guitars, drones, and guttural rhythms carrying the weight of prophecy, each phrase pressed with the urgency of confession… The video… unfolds as a fever montage of archival fragments and uncanny tableaux, stitched together with the logic of a sanitarium nightmare. A woman drifts in a hospital bed while her mind cycles through endless corridors, grim historical portraits of evil, and unsettling sketches clawed from the recesses of the psyche…” – Alice Teeple, Post-punk.com, USA
Formed in 2023, Zabus has usually functioned as a floating collective of contributors, including former members of Moore’s previous bands, Zero Swann and Gorazde, among others. Whores of Holyrood, however, is the first Zabus album performed entirely by Jeremy Moore, and sees the comparatively naked influence of dark blues and traditional American folk elements coming further to the fore.
The latest offering is also the most overtly political statement from Zabus to date.
Whores Of Holyrood explores what Moore describes as “the positive feedback loop between fascist authoritarian rule and societal inaction, apathy and resignation. Holyrood is a metaphor for the established classist hierarchy which derives its strength and influence from our subjugation.”
At its core, the Whores Of Holyrood album is a psychedelic rock / gothic blues album, drawing on diverse influences, eliciting comparisons from reviewers to the introspective balladry of Nick Cave, Tom Waits or Michael Gira, through to the trance-inducing drones of Spacemen 3, The Velvet Underground, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Sonic Youth; from the icy post-punk minimalism and bleak existentialism of Joy Division, to the straight-ahead hard rock of Lucifuge-era Danzig. Meanwhile, discordant avant-garde flourishes throughout create an “audio surreality effect”—urban and societal decay is a central lyrical theme to the album and noise elements have been fused with traditional arrangements to create a new way of viewing and broadcasting a world crippled by corruption, religious perversity and devolution.
“Like a séance through distorted amplifiers… the kind of haunting gravitas that makes you question whether you’re witnessing art or exorcism… Zabus occupies that liminal space between the sacred and profane, where gothic Americana meets psychedelic decay in a ritual that feels both deeply personal and universally apocalyptic… Whores Of Holyrood treads a precarious line between dark blues-drenched Americana and psychedelic overlay, creating something that feels perpetually submerged. Moore’s processed psych guitars emanate like glimpses of light through floorboard cracks, whilst his voice carries the kind of shadowy authority that recalls both Nick Cave‘s introspective balladry and Michael Gira‘s existential weight… Whores Of Holyrood succeeds as both sonic statement and political meditation, finding Moore at his most focused and urgent… Moore’s call for resistance… finds its most compelling expression in tracks like ‘Bone Record’ and the title track itself. Here, the political becomes deeply personal, and the experimental serves the emotional rather than merely showcasing technical prowess. Whores Of Holyrood stands as Moore’s most cohesive statement to date, a work that manages to feel both timeless in its gothic weight and urgently contemporary in its political anger.”
– Daniel de Jongh, Discipline Magazine, Australia
“If Ketamine were a style of music, it would probably sound a lot like Zabus does on their latest album… hallucinogenic, dark and disconcerting, calming to the point of sedation, producing out-of-body experiences, and amnesiac episodes… a sonic mirror that reflects all of those things, sometimes all at once… If you take your time to understand what’s going on here, you find a very political album. Sometimes conveyed in the message itself, but more often through a sense of rebellious creativity. In its musical folds and boundary-testing, cross-pollination and outsiderness, it reminds us not to fall victim to fads and fashion, especially when dealing with political ideology and worldviews. It tells us to think for ourselves, whether by rejecting existing conventions or at least questioning why things are the way they are. Do that, and the propaganda and demarcations, media rhetoric and bitter entrenchments start to unravel… If there is anything we need more than people asking questions, people adopting roads less travelled, people offering alternatives, then I have yet to find it. Today might be a small revolution, such as challenging music; tomorrow might be about questioning the very norms and traditions of society itself!”
– Dave Franklin, Big Takeover Magazine, USA
“Zabus have been on fire lately… It’s not only the prolific output which is noteworthy… we’re looking at a creative purple patch of innovation and ideas flowing in full spate… Anyone with an outlet, or a platform, right now, has a duty to state their position. Silence is complicity. We know this from history. Individually, there is next to nothing we can do to stop Trump’s fascistic march, or halt the genocide in Gaza, or stop the wat in Sudan. But fucking hell, we are witnessing hell on earth right now… ‘Shadow Genesis’… launches the album with its reverb-heavy blues guitar and gothic stylings, and its dark, brooding, but it’s nothing to the snarling lo-fi post-punk goth epic that is ‘Burn to Your Own Destruction’: six and a half minutes of echo-soaked guitar swirling beneath bombastic baritone vocals, while the tile track is commanding, archly gothic, but with murky black metal production values. The same is true of ‘A-YA Bullet V’, which brings the driving funk groove of Bauhaus at their best, while also pushing the experimentalism to the fore. ‘Cremation Psalm’ is a murky swagger, equal parts Nick Cave and The Volcanoes, and every track on this album is pure gold. The muffled, echo-heavy production is not a detriment, but an asset, accentuating the old-school vibe which is so integral to the experience… ‘Sod Martyr’ is dark, dark, dark, and sparse, and something about it calls to mind The Honolulu Mountain Daffodils, while ‘Strangers of Non-Being’ brings together goth and heavy psychedelia with the addition of low, slow drone… If the Shadow Genesis EP showcased a keen experimentalism, and a broad range of stylistic touchstones, then Whores of Holyrood takes it all to the next level. Zabus keep pushing forward, outward, onward. Right now, it seems there is no stopping them.”
– Christopher Nosnibor, Aural Aggravation, UK
“On what is surely his most political work to date, the multitalented artist explores the pernicious connection between fascist, authoritarian rule and social inactivity, apathy, and resignation… In a maze of icy post-punk minimalism and darkest existentialism, Moore’s new tracks are a blunt warning of the highway toward dictatorship on which his homeland is located… The dark stories are embedded in a fitting musical guise, with dark blues, Americana, and post-punk elements combining to create haunting, eerie melodies… as if NICKCAVE and JOY DIVISION had conceived an unhappy child in some desolate corner of the States. Moore relies on almost minimalist structures that nevertheless have plenty of rough edges and impress with their eerily beautiful atmosphere.”
– Bernhard Kleinbruckner, SLAM Magazine, Austria / Germany
Whores of Holyrood by Zabus was released via D.C. label imprint and art / media collective, Saccharine Underground, on 12 August 2025, as a download from Bandcamp and on streaming platforms everywhere. The new video-single ‘Strangers of Non-Being’ is out now.