“If you don’t know it yet, it’s my privilege to tell you that Ryan Davis is one of the greatest songwriters of his generation. Bold instinct immediately insists that I lose the qualifications: he’s the greatest of his generation, he’s one of the greatest ever. Whatever. Posterity—if there is a posterity—will sort it out. Happily, New Threats from the Soul has beaten the Doomsday Clock to the wire, and we appear to have a little while left to revel in it, receive its revelations, and be revealed by it…

…New Threats from the Soul is a masterclass in reducing the sublime to the prosaic, immensity to infinitesimality, and vice versa (the trick can only work both ways). Everything in our universe is essentially flotsam or jetsam, rubbish heaps of fragments and shards, a ‘pile of voodoo dolls and iron scrap in the backyard for the meek to inherit.’ We, especially, are jerry-rigs of bubblegum and driftwood, inconsistencies and incoherencies, dead dreams and necrophagous hopes, ‘mismeasurements between the place where [we are] and the place where [we] could have been,’ although somehow not—miracle of miracles—bereft of simple joys. The record functions in parallel with Kafka’s winking dictum that there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, just not for us. At least, I would venture for coldest comfort, not as we have constituted ourselves. When Ryan has the penny slot yell ‘What even am I, by god?’ toward the high stakes room, the soul chills and thrills at being so seen. New Threats suggests that maybe, just maybe, something like redemption is possible, but only once we’re entirely emptied out and hawked in toto down at Walden Pawn.”—Nathan Salsburg, April 2025