Citizens- Fear
Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death...
Citizens have been one of the most consistently solid spirit-led rock bands for over a decade, but that consistency belies a strange and fascinating artistic trajectory. In the midst of writing some of the most triumphant worship music imaginable, they got caught in a seismic church implosion and emerged with a very different outlook on themselves, their songwriting, and possibly even their faith. This is, among other things, a deep dive on Fear, the fascinating result of a worship band grappling with their own soul.
To start, let’s look at some lyrics. Below is the chorus of the second song on each album and EP they released between 2013 and 2019. See if you can spot any sort of trend over the years:
Oh, the love that sought me!/Oh, the blood that bought me!/Oh, the grace that brought me to the fold of God -“In Tenderness”, Citizens (2013)
And led me out to an open land of peace/My soul is well, I am loved and know that You delight in me/And in the dark You're redeeming light endures/Forever, I'm saved secure -“Saved Secure”, Join the Triumph (2014)
Your ways are not my ways/Your thoughts are not my thoughts/I want to understand/But I cannot comprehend/I’m so lost, I'm so lost - “Madness”, A Mirror Dimly (2016)
But when I give all I have in vain/It doesn't matter what I build if it crumbles down anyway/And though I rise up before the day/I'm doing everything for nothing just to prove I got what it takes/But it's fake, I fade - “Everything for Nothing”, Fear (2019)
Oh God, it’s heavy/This ocean of alarm/Don’t leave me buried/I can’t be good as gone/Oh God‚ it’s heavy/This ocean of uncalm/Can I be carried/Before I’m good as… - “Good as Gone”, Waking Up to Never Die (2019)
Notice a downward spiral starting around 2016? There’s a good chance that it was related to the collapse of Mars Hill, the Seattle-based megachurch that grew at an astonishing rate before the foundations of the church proved to be shockingly flimsy. As I detailed in this post, what happened to Kings Kaleidoscope was the best case-scenario for a band caught in a noxious church environment. Most were not so lucky. A few of the thousands of spiritual casualties left in the wake of the devastation were the members Citizens & Saints, an in-house worship band that had written some excellent original music and skillfully rearranged hymns to reflect the tastes of their Seattle congregants and/or audience. While their sound and lyricism has evolved considerably since their first two albums, there is still a real sense of excitement and jubilation in the early stuff. Songs such as “Made Alive”, “You Brought Me Back to Life”, and “In Tenderness” were deservedly successful, and some of the deep cuts hold up very well.
However, fun praise anthems are a poor solace when your spiritual community splinters and disintegrates. Understandably, Citizens & Saints became a very different band. First they rebranded, becoming “Citizens”, then released A Mirror Dimly, a mind-boggling magnum opus of a record exploring spiritual doubt. The songs were more ambitious, the lyrics were more personal, and the album itself was arranged very skillfully to depict something of an arc to the soul-searching the band had been going through. Even the best songs on albums’ past couldn’t hold a candle to the writing on display here, and A Mirror Dimly sits comfortably in my shortlist of the greatest spiritual albums of the 2010s.
One thing that’s particularly rewarding about A Mirror Dimly is how well-contained a listening experience it is. The album starts low, drops to the lowest point ever seen in the band’s history up to that point, then slowly emerges from the depths to a triumphant resolution with the refrain of “I am loved no matter what” on the closing track. In fact, it was such a good conclusion that the band themselves seemed unsure of how to follow it up. When a new single was finally announced two years later, it only reinforced the notion that the band was lost, and it could not have been a more obvious bellwether. It was called “Fear”.
“Fear” is a haunted electropop dirge that seems to provide veiled allusions to some harrowing spiritual experiences from the few years prior. The first verse cuts to the chase with lyrics such as all the million sparks of good intention/I watch them all just flicker out instead. The cynicism looms incredibly large in the opening lyrics, suffocating any joy or hope while the chorus offers little reprieve:
I can’t find the faith and I’m feeling so afraid
And I don’t want to be stuck a captive in this cage
I need to break out, I’ve tried all I can do
Only you can break these bars, I want to fly away with You
For all its unease, “Fear” is a really good song. It’s a stunning embodiment of its title in every aspect, and it does a great job of treating the subject matter seriously without being too heavy-handed. Even when little glimmers of hope gleam between the cracks at the end of the song, the tide of paranoia repeatedly threatens to drown it out. It ends on a cliffhanger, setting up the rest of the album brilliantly without showing all the cards.
The title track may have pulled a couple punches by being ambiguous in subject matter, but the follow up, “Everything for Nothing”, goes straight for the jugular. Here, Zach Bolen’s anger and desperation is laser-guided, firing salvo after salvo at the integrity of his motivations. In tearing himself down though, Zach Bolen deals a lot of collateral damage to the problematic leadership ideals that prop up unhealthy churches. He may have given everything he had and more to ministry so he could prove that he was a tough soldier for the Lord, but it’s easy to feel sympathetic when this was the spiritual nourishment being fed to him:
Hand, tied to the plow
All for some pleasure, but it's wearing me down
Lulled by a lie
Won't find something better
Then what's already found
Then there’s the music, and it's a masterclass in how to write a good chamber rock song. The intro comes barreling out of the gate like a runaway train, and it keeps momentum with the help of a propulsive piano loop reminiscent of a top-tier Arcade Fire song. Meanwhile, a sorrowful saxophone adds extra punch to the heavier moments, and a strange oscillating synth provides a sinister undercurrent to the otherwise exciting instrumentation. It’s a fantastic song all around, perhaps my favorite in their whole discography.
The third song might be cut from the same cloth as the first two, but the lyrics hit far deeper. If “Fear” was an introduction to the dueling spiritual forces at play and “Everything for Nothing” was the sound of the light slowly fading, “Out of Sight” is what happens when malevolent forces within one’s spiritual community win:
Out of sight, out of mind
If no one speaks then we'll be fine
Forget the blood, just give it time
The more we wait, the more it dies
They’ve intentionally left it open to interpretation, but I think this song is about churches throwing dirt on their worst aspects. It seems like every month or two there’s a new high-profile Christian thought leader who’s outed as an abusive megalomaniac, with one tragic throughline being the silence and compliance of the people put in place to keep them accountable. The rest of the song certainly does a good job highlighting how awful of a life it is to be a cog in a faulty machine, ruminating on the feelings of arrogance, shame, loneliness, and cognitive dissonance that comes with the territory. The music is chilling in its own right, with my favorite moment on the album being the wordless howls in the last 35 seconds.
The rest of the album pumps the breaks a little on the suffocating dread. “Illusion” plays with dark and light imagery to wrestle with the feeling of being scared of spiritual growth. “The Wait’s Not Easy” chastises the church for choosing to fight and shun anyone that isn’t perceived to be “on our side”. Finally, the propulsive “Looking Up” is a late turning point on the album, seeing the band finally mastering their terror and self-loathing to the tune of a refreshingly sunny and slick musical backdrop. It’s also the only song from Fear that isn’t completely out of place in the celebratory atmosphere of their concerts.
If you’ve gotten to this point in my kinda-synopsis-kinda-review of Fear, you might have the same question that’s been bugging me for years. The question that made me want to do a deep dive on this album in the first place:
Why did they write this album?
Why did they double down on themes of being a part of a bad ministry after already doing such a great job of it with A Mirror Dimly? Why does it sound the way it does? What’s the album even trying to say?
I didn’t really expect a good answer to my questions, but Citizens provided one anyway. Way back in the promo material on the band's Facebook page, Zach explained that one of the defining themes of the album is that “fear can act like a drug”. My interpretation is that they were aiming to write an album that unpacked the idea of returning to the same destructive tendencies so soon after declaring victory over them. Maybe it was only after they attempted to slay their demons through song that they realized that they might have felt more assured, more secure, and dare I say…safer, in Mars Hill. Perhaps a small part of them wanted to go back to the way it was. For all the awfulness that came about from one man posturing as a vengeful prophet, the fear shaded everything in a way that made sense and drew clear boundaries. Viewed in this light, I think Fear is an intriguing exploration of the phenomenon where people actively choose to be a part of churches seek to make people afraid and feed upon that fear. It’s also the closest thing I’ve heard to a substantive warning to anyone who thinks they want that.
Fortunately, Citizens almost certainly realized that it would be hard to escape the headspace of Fear if they dwelled on it for too much longer. The following year, they would release The Joy of Being, which is essentially what playing Fear backwards would sound like. Its pacing is slow, its arrangements are more organic, and above all its BEAUTIFUL. Every single song adds something to the album, and it is exactly the kind of music you’d want to hear from an record that celebrates community in Christ. It’s also the rare “worship album” that was written to be listened to in church and as a studio recording, a surprisingly rare combination.
They’ve since moved back into a similar sound that they were going for in their early days, and they still make pretty good music. After several years of fumbling around in the dark, they’ve turned a corner and always seem excited to share their love of the Lord with everyone who will listen. Before that could happen though, Citizens had to let their art uncomfortably stand in the crossroads between triumph and doubt, trusting that their bold lack of direction was what someone somewhere needed to hear. They gave all they had, and it was not in vain.
BONUS RECOMMENDATION
For further proof that they really were at a crossroads in their career, look no further than the EP they released the same year Waking Up to Never Die. It only really exists due to the fact that the Fear Kickstarter campaign was so successful that they released it as a bonus, but it's further proof that they absolutely could have made many more songs like “Fear” if they wanted to.