Amidst societal strife and global pandemic, Maynard James Keenan returns with the most personal and human of his three main bands, reviving Puscifer with the group's fourth official full-length, Existential Reckoning. As the title suggests, this time things are more serious than usual and the core trio of Keenan, Carina Round, and Mat Mitchell crafted a politically charged takedown of the state of the world circa 2020. Although Reckoning stands as one of the most subdued – and least sophomoric – Puscifer albums, it swaps out their usual hallmarks in favor of substance and emotion, resulting in their tightest and most thematically focused output to date.

Following the newly-released, rocking “The Underwhelming” and early spring singalong “Apocalyptical,” Puscifer are back. The unpindownable music-and-performance-art collective led by Tool and A Perfect Circle frontman and “agent-in-training” Maynard James Keenan (a.k.a. Dick Merkin) and “special agents-in-charge” Mat Mitchell (guitar, bass, keys) and Carina Round (vocals, keys) will release Existential Reckoning, a 12-song album scheduled for an October 30th arrival via Alchemy Recordings/Puscifer Entertainment/BMG.

A place for Tool and A Perfect Circle frontman Maynard James Keenan’s musical explorations, Puscifer is a project that, by its very nature, has that free association vibe around it. On his second album under the Puscifer moniker, Conditions of My Parole, Keenan continues to his unfettered explorations, seeing where a sound will take him without being tied down by the expectations that would be present if he released these songs with any of his other projects. A departure from the angst of Tool and the esoteric darkness of A Perfect Circle, the synth-heavy album has a more autumnal feeling about it, combining layers of electronic ambience and programmed drums with the singer's yearning vocals to create a kind of cold loneliness. It’s this isolated sound that Keenan thrives in, with his trademark vocals adding just the right amount of drama to the mix and acting as the glue that manages to hold everything together when the mood strikes him to drift into more aggressive territory on songs like “Toma” and “Conditions of My Parole”.