🇺🇦 Side-Line stands with Ukraine - Show your Support

Baltimore-founded experimental rock quartet Horse Lords have shared the title track and video from Horse Lords “Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!”, their sixth studio album, out on June 12, 2026 via RVNG Intl. in vinyl, CD and digital editions. The single arrives ahead of an extensive tour across the UK, Europe and North America, including a London date at the ICA on November 11.

The title track combines alto saxophone, voices, guitar and electronics over a steady backbeat. According to the band’s label, the raw material for the piece comes from the group’s work with composer Arnold Dreyblatt, developed with frequency modulation synthesis, and the beat is accented by a Kuwaiti mirwas hand drum.

Table of contents

1 Video built around the Chromaccord light instrument
2 Horse Lords ‘Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!’ tracklist and credits
3 Tour dates for Horse Lords
4 About Horse Lords

Video built around the Chromaccord light instrument

The video for “Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!” was created by Dan Conrad using a light-art instrument he calls the Chromaccord. “In the 70s, I built a visual performance instrument that displayed areas of colored light on a translucent screen and used manually controlled dimmers to change the colors. I named the instrument a ‘chromaccord’, meaning ‘colors together,’ and performed it live with musicians,” Conrad stated. For the album visuals, Conrad used an LED version of the instrument to create five patterns, improvising colour changes in response to the music. Will Schorre filmed the performance and edited the final video, which can be watched here: Horse Lords – Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! (Official Video).

On the intent behind the record, the band commented: “we try to make music that challenges the status quo and offers a path toward liberation for the listener. The study and exploration of sound and music has a spiritual and ecstatic dimension, and we have a great reverence for its impact on the individual and the world.”

Horse Lords ‘Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!’ tracklist and credits

The album (catalog number RVNGNL136) contains twelve tracks. The opener “Eureka 378-B” is an arrangement of a nineteenth-century hymn by John P. Rees from The Sacred Harp (Cooper edition), with lyrics by Thomas Kelly (1802). Pre-orders run via Bandcamp and the label’s order page.

Eureka 378-B
Brain of the Firm
Rotation I
Playing and Reality
Rotation II
First Galactic Utopia
Rotation III
Before the Law
After the Last Sky
A City Yet to Come
Second Galactic Utopia
Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!

The lineup on the album is Owen Gardner (guitar, percussion), Max Eilbacher (bass guitar, computer), Sam Haberman (drums) and Andrew Bernstein (saxophone, percussion, computer). Guests include vocalists Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor — a first for the band — plus bass clarinettist Madison Greenstone and trombonist Weston Olencki. The album was recorded by Adam Asnan in Berlin and Jared Paolini in Baltimore, mixed by Owen Gardner and mastered by Heba Kadry in Brooklyn. The band’s four members have lived in different cities since 2021; Gardner, Eilbacher and Bernstein tracked their parts in Berlin while Haberman recorded his drum parts in Baltimore.

Tour dates for Horse Lords

UK and Europe:

19-20 June – Kongsberg (NO) – Motvind Festival
1 August – Tasov (CZ) – Beseda Festival
6-8 August – Haldern (DE) – Haldern Pop Festival
3 November – Aarhus (DK) – VoxHall
4 November – Copenhagen (DK) – Loppen
5 November – Stockholm (SE) – Hus 7
7 November – Hamburg (DE) – MS Stubnitz
9 November – Paris (FR) – Instants Chavirés
11 November – London (UK) – ICA
15 November – Lille (FR) – L’Aéronef
18 November – Berlin (DE) – Silent Green
19 November – Warsaw (PL) – Pardon To Tu

North America:

9-10 July – Winnipeg, MB (CA) – Winnipeg Folk Festival
11 July – Minneapolis, MN (US) – The Cedar
12 July – Madison, WI (US) – Art Lit Lab
13 July – Rock Island, IL (US) – Rozz Tox
14 July – Yellow Springs, OH (US) – Foundry Theatre
15 July – State College, PA (US) – Manny’s
16 July – Buffalo, NY (US) – Torn Space Theatre
17-18 July – Guelph, ON (CA) – Hillside Festival
18 July – Chatham, NY (US) – PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance
25 July – Los Angeles, CA (US) – The Getty Center
24 September – Cincinnati, OH (US) – Talk Low
25 September – St Louis, MO (US) – New Music Circle
26 September – Columbia, MO (US) – Cafe Berlin
27 September – Urbana, IL (US) – Gallery Art Bar – Pygmalion Festival
28 September – Chicago, IL (US) – Empty Bottle
30 September – Detroit, MI (US) – Trinosophes
1 October – Toronto, ON (CA) – The Garrison – Project Nowhere
2 October – Montreal, QC (CA) – Théâtre Fairmount
3 October – Portland, ME (US) – SPACE Gallery
5 October – Boston, MA (US) – Deep Cuts
6 October – Northampton, MA (US) – Iron Horse
8 October – Brooklyn, NY (US) – Pioneer Works
9 October – Philadelphia, PA (US) – Solar Myth – Ars Nova Workshop
10 October – Baltimore, MD (US) – Ottobar
11 October – Carrboro, NC (US) – The Arts Center
12 October – Asheville, NC (US) – AyurPrana Listening Room
13 October – Atlanta, GA (US) – Drunken Unicorn
15 October – Omaha, NE (US) – Bemis Center

About Horse Lords

Horse Lords were founded in Baltimore, Maryland in 2010, evolving out of the experimental group Teeth Mountain. The band began as a trio of guitarist Owen Gardner, bassist Max Eilbacher and drummer Sam Haberman, with alto saxophonist Andrew Bernstein joining the core lineup soon after. Their music draws on just intonation, polyrhythm and repetition, and is tagged on their own Bandcamp page as rock, experimental and microtonal.

The group released their self-titled debut album in 2012, followed by “Hidden Cities” in 2014 and “Interventions” in 2016 on Northern Spy Records. “The Common Task” followed in 2020, and in 2022 the band moved to RVNG Intl. for “Comradely Objects”. More recent releases include the live album “As It Happened: Horse Lords Live” (2024) and “FRKWYS Vol. 18: Extended Field” (November 2025), a collaboration with composer Arnold Dreyblatt for RVNG Intl.’s FRKWYS series. Since 2021 the four members have been split between cities, with Gardner, Eilbacher and Bernstein based in Germany and Haberman in Baltimore. “Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!”, out June 12, 2026, is the quartet’s sixth studio album and their second studio full-length for RVNG Intl.

Bernard - Side-Line Staff

Chief editor of Side-Line – which basically means I spend my days wading through a relentless flood of press releases from labels, artists, DJs, and zealous correspondents. My job? Strip out the promo nonsense, verify what’s actually real, and decide which stories make the cut and which get tossed into the digital void. Outside the news filter bubble, I’m all in for quality sushi and helping raise funds for Ukraine’s ongoing fight against the modern-day axis of evil. Besides music I’m also an SEO and AI content flow specialist and have an interest in everything finance from stocks to crypto. There is music in everything!

side-line.com

Since you’re here …

… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading Side-Line Magazine than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. Unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to keep our journalism as open as we can - and we refuse to add annoying advertising. So you can see why we need to ask for your help.

Side-Line’s independent journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we want to push the artists we like and who are equally fighting to survive.

If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future would be much more secure. For as little as 5 US$, you can support Side-Line Magazine – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.

The donations are safely powered by Paypal.