Almost all bands do it backward and upside-down. They start with years of playing live, creating their music in the crucible of performance with all of its impurities and in-the-moment inspirations, before committing said music to a recording that fixes it into an ostensible, exemplary form that eternally serves as an ultimate reference. And then maybe, someday, a few albums down the road, when the tours are shorter and less frequent and the cupboard is looking a little bare, they excavate and massage some favorite board recordings into a live album to fill a gap in some capitalist imagining of “career.”

Following last year’s album Comradely Objects, Horse Lords offer an exploded view of the quartet’s unparalleled live show via Live in Leipzig, a four song EP captured in Germany at the UT Connewitz theater on their fall 2022 European tour.

Horse Lords return with Comradely Objects, a continuation of the quartet’s exploration of repetition in minimalism and traditional musics, complex counterpoint, timbres and texture, but also an evolution of these sometimes disparate musical strands wound tightly around propulsive rhythmic grids. The most sublime document yet of the band’s ongoing interrogation of aesthetic and social form, purpose, and intent, Comradely Objects doesn’t identify a new utopia so much as limn a thrilling portrait of revolution underway.