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Amen Dunes has always worked with an outsider’s verve, but as he approached his seventh album in fall 2019, it was clear to Damon McMahon that he needed to become an outsider to his own history. “I was tired of the music I’d become convinced I had to limit myself to.” Instead of embarking on a familiar project, he decided to become a beginner again, immersing himself in the fundamentals of both piano and the electronic music he’d grown up with at raves and clubs but never imagined himself able to make. Few Amen Dunes fans might have perceived the lasting effect such music had on his work, but with Death Jokes, these influences would become clear. This album also marks a change in thematic focus; through samples and lyrics, Damon is much more directly critiquing the way American culture exalts violence, coercion, and groupthink as societal inevitabilities. Though the eerie, modern blend of folk and blues that Amen Dunes is best known for is very much present here, Death Jokes is a major departure, an ambitious electronic album that reveals new artistic abilities and concerns. On most songs Damon incorporated sounds, talking, and music pilfered from Youtube, and the vast collage of samples include Nadia Boulanger giving advice in French, an ancient music scholar’s lyre performance of the oldest written song in human history, protest chants, a grunting powerlifter, and bits of stand-up from Lenny Bruce, and others, included as “thought provocation and irritant.” These fourteen songs function as an essay on the way America’s culture of violence, dominance, and destructive individualism has crescendoed and imploded in recent years.