When Landon Noland was Artist Spotlight No. 44, he was a guy from my own backyard with a voice way too big for the bars he was playing. Now Cities of Babylon is here, his first proper album, and it finally gives that voice a stage its size: seven songs of dark, theatrical, patient rock and metal that sounds built for a much bigger room.
You know it's going to be a little different when an album opens on the sound of children playing and chattering. Cities of Babylon takes its time with a slow, smoky prologue before the guitar and drums finally kick in, and once they do, it gets progressive fast: tom-heavy drumming, vocals dragged up from somewhere deep, and ghostly falsetto harmonies hovering over the top. The way I hear it, Babylon is every power structure built on greed and corruption. We've been breathing in that poison (plastics, drugs, heavy metals, wealth) our whole lives, stuck in the fishbowl, and even when we're heard and agreed with, the hypocrisy of people nodding along who still don't lend a hand. So the song asks the uncomfortable question: is burning it all down and starting over for the kids the only way forward? Suddenly those kids in the intro make a lot of sense.
Then Landon does the ambient intro trick again, and I'm fully on board. Black Ink swaps the playground for, what I envision, a swamp at night: wind, creaking wood, frogs, insects, and something out in the dark you'd rather not meet on a Louisiana dock at 2am. The band stays steady and tense while Landon reaches for a dark, Zeppelin-sized vocal, and the hook isn't a big chorus. It's the way he sings "go away," a little melodic phrase so satisfying to repeat that it becomes a vocal stim. You'll be doing it in the car. Underneath, it's a furious song about one person's mistakes poisoning an entire family, and refusing to let them drag him down too.
If the first two songs are about poison, The Final Page is what's left once it's done its job. It opens on a deliberate guitar solo, the drums drop in with a little shuffle on the snare's off beats, and nothing rushes. It's patient without ever being slow: no speed, no flash, no showing off, just guitar notes stretched out and felt. That patience fits, because it feels like someone taking in the wreckage rather than running from it. The way I hear it, it's about history repeating itself: violence with no real "right" side, the guilt it leaves behind, and how we bury or rewrite the past so we can cope with what we did, or to justify doing it again. Three songs in, it starts to feel like Babylon falling in stages. A poisoned city, then a poisoned family, then a world at war with itself.
Lockdown brings that collapse right to our doorstep, and it doesn't pretend to be about anything other than the pandemic. It starts on nimble fingerpicked guitar and grows into the most protest-ready song on the record, with every dynamic shift and harmony placed exactly where it'll hurt most. Overwhelmed hospitals, plans that stopped making sense overnight, a whole world hiding under its rock hoping it would end. It's full of questions with no good answers, and you feel every bit of the frustration, anger, and loss. Honestly, a brilliant song. And Kept Inside plays like the personal side of that same isolation. It opens on the most melodic guitar intro on the album, warm and ringing, brighter than the song's mood, the way the best '90s alt-rock ballads did it. The bass moves to the front for the first time, everything softens (by Landon's standards, anyway), and if this record has a ballad, this is it. Call it tender metal. It's about being on the outside looking in at someone you can't reach, missing them so much you'd happily let them annoy you again. It might be the sweetest idea on the whole album.
Then comes Zealot, and this is where I lost all professional composure. It's Landon’s love song, slow and patient in 3/4, with tender distorted guitars and haunting backing harmonies. Calling himself a zealot for her, and he means it. It's a love song so devoted it borders on religious, and so unsure of itself it sounds like a war. That's exactly where the military snare comes in during the second bridge, marching right alongside that line, and as a drummer I live for moments like that. The emotion in his voice on the bridge is unreal. You can feel the yearning, the depth of it, and it's a kind of love I relate to completely. Is this actually a masterpiece? I keep asking myself that, and I keep saying yes.
Which leaves Numbers to close it out with the best guitar riff on the album. A low, muted, chugging pick carries the verses over rich floor tom work. It feels dangerous, like something predatory is watching you from just out of frame. When I covered it for his Spotlight, I called it his most personal song yet, written about life with Type 1 diabetes and a near-death low he survived. Placed at the end, it lands differently. After six songs of poisoned cities, wars, and lockdowns, the last fight is the most personal one, against his own body. And Landon doesn't sound scared. He sings with power, pride, and ownership, like he's inviting the fight and knows he can take it. More military snare marches in behind the guitar solo, the smoke clears for a moment, and then the climax slams back in, Landon belting as the guitar climbs higher. It's the most anthemic thing he's ever written, and it dares you to sing it back.
Okay, the honest part. Cities of Babylon asks a lot of you. The callbacks between songs, and even within them, only came together for me after multiple listens and some real dissecting. Fans of this kind of music will happily do that homework. A casual listener might not stick around long enough to truly get to the detail. Could he find a bridge between this depth and something a little more immediate? I don't know, but if he can, I wouldn’t be surprised. But if not, he'll do just fine in the world he's already building.
For a debut, it's remarkably sure of itself. Sounds that come back from earlier songs, scenes built from sound design, a drummer's eye for detail, and a voice that can go from guttural to fragile in the same song. Babylon may be falling, but Landon Noland is standing in the rubble, singing like a man ready to rebuild.
