What is the worship music “sound”? Most of us probably conjure a similar aesthetic when we ponder that question. But John Van Deusen wants to expand our horizons, giving Christians a bigger vision for what worship music can be. I’m here for it. Are you?

Van Deusen’s ambitious new project—a 33-song, two-part magnum opus titled As Long as I’m in the Tent of This Body I Will Make a Joyful Noise—is a “genre-mashing dose of exploratory worship music,” as his official Spotify bio describes it. That puts it mildly.

Part 1 of the album releases today, and it’s an 18-track roller coaster of sonic twists and turns: straightforward worship anthems, guitar-shredding instrumentals, hymnlike ballads, even an interlude of ribbiting frogs. It’s a constantly surprising but always stirring journey—one of the most devotionally rich musical expressions I’ve heard in years.

John Van Deusen wants to give Christians a bigger vision for what worship music can be.

Joyful Noise is a sort of companion piece to Van Deusen’s magnificent 2017 worship album, Every Power Wide Awake, which landed at number 4 on The Gospel Coalition’s list of the best Christian albums of the 2010s. But this album feels even more monumental—more musically daring, more desperate in its devotion.

Recorded in a basement tanning room over the course of a year, in a season of thriving faith but fragile mental health, the album is deeply personal for the native of Anacortes, Washington. Yet it’s a labor of love—one which will bear fruit and make waves for years to come. Many of the songs are singable worship melodies not unlike youth group praise-night staples, but filtered through a grunge-punk aesthetic of someone who grew up on Nirvana, The Ramones, and The Clash. If it sounds weird and radical, it’s because it is.

Even the album cover art is ambitious. Handmade by Van Deusen, the massive collage project went through 100 drafts before the final version. It’s just one example of the meticulous, quirky craft of one of Christian music’s most visionary artists.

I sat down with Van Deusen recently to chat about the album and how it fits into the larger “worship music” conversation. Read excerpts from our conversation below. Subscribe to my arts and culture newsletter to get exclusive access to even more of the interview. And when you have a chance, be sure to listen to the album—all 18 songs of it, in one sitting. Volume up.

You found early success with a secular indie rock band, The Lonely Forest, starting when you were a senior in high school 20 years ago. When did you become a Christian, and how did that change the trajectory of your music career—to the point where you’re now releasing double albums of worship songs?

The Lonely Forest had a lot of momentum and energy for maybe three or four years, where we toured quite a bit and were playing in front of a lot of people. And then it kind of plateaued. This coincided with my personal journey, where in my early 20s I became a real believer in Christ and my life just shifted. I needed change in my life.

My personal ambition, my reckless, chaotic nature when I was younger, just became this out-of-control thing. In my need, I came to Christ, really poor in spirit, saying, “Hey, you can have your way in my life.” My priorities shifted. I suddenly worked a lot harder to preserve my marriage, which, when you’re a touring artist, is a difficult thing to preserve. And I didn’t care quite as much about becoming a successful musician.

It’s been an interesting journey for me, because I grew up in a music scene where being a Christian artist was by far the least cool thing you could ever do. And so I was really nervous when I became a believer and I wanted to start singing about it. I was really afraid.

And to be clear, since I’ve been really honest about my faith, at least regionally in the Northwest, a lot of the people I collaborated with and were friends with, they’ve remained friendly to me, but they’ve very politely taken a step back. Which is fine. I understand it. But I used to be very, very connected in the Northwest indie rock scene. And faith and rock and roll just don’t mix up here.

You serve as a worship director at Christ the King Church in Anacortes. How does that experience influence your own worship-music songwriting?

I can’t stand most [recorded] worship music, but I actually really love leading worship. There are a lot of songs I love so much. I absolutely love leading “Holy Forever,” for example. I love hearing the congregation sing it. It’s a well-written song. Would I put Chris Tomlin’s “Holy Forever” recording on in my car? Never. That’s not a critique of him. It’s just that I’m shaped by my own tastes and impulses, and I like something really hyperspecific. So I live in this fascinating tension between loving leading worship and actually just kinda despising worship music as a genre. That’s pretty much why this record exists.

You’re getting at an important difference between the mode of congregational singing—tied to a specific place, for a particular gathered people—and the mode of song recordings that individuals listen to in their car or headphones. What’s the overlap there for you, in terms of the worship songs on your new album? Could you see them working in congregational worship?

I would argue that a lot of the songs, if filtered through a different aesthetic, would work really well in a congregational setting. Probably much to the chagrin of my record label because I’ll write a song that Chris Tomlin could sing in a broadly appealing way. But I want it to sound like The Lemonheads, Death Cab for Cutie, Tears for Fears, or The Clash. But the song itself, the chord progression, the lyrics, the melodic choices are adaptable to mainstream settings.

I’m just filtering it through my aesthetic. There are songs on both part 1 and part 2 that I cowrote with really strong worship writers. There’s one song on part 2 that I wrote with Matt Maher. It absolutely could be a song you might hear performed from any mainstream worship artist.

When I play some of these songs at our church in Anacortes, they don’t sound anything like what they sound like on the record. That’s intentional, because my hope would be that maybe one or two of these songs would be picked up by another artist and they’ll do their rendition of it.

What motivated you to make such an ambitious double album of worship?

Making this record has been really personal and honestly, really difficult. I’ve struggled a lot with depression while making it. It took a lot from me. I’ve joked that it has felt like a Horcrux. Like a piece of myself was lost to it.

But one of my key motivators has been, I wanted to make an artistic statement. I love Jesus with all my heart. I do like leading worship. But I can’t stand worship music. So I decided to make this big thing that spans a lot of my personal tastes. I wanted to see if I could make something I would want to listen to. It is kind of an artistic statement.

How would you articulate what that artistic statement is?

Hey, look, you can do it too. Hey, your worship record doesn’t have to sound like Phil Wickham. And it shouldn’t, because Phil does Phil Wickham. He does it perfectly. We don’t need another Phil. We don’t need another Brandon Lake or Chris Tomlin. And that’s not saying you can’t use them as creative touchstones, because I do too. It’s really just, You can make a worship record that can be called worship music as a genre and it can have, like, two minutes of distorted noise. Or a song that sounds like Peter Gabriel, or name whatever indie rock band.

I think the moment when that ‘statement’ becomes really clear is track 15, ‘I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship.’ When I first saw that title I was like, ‘Oh, is he covering that old Matt Redman worship song? Interesting.’ And then I listened to it, and I couldn’t stop smiling. It’s just an instrumental piece, hard-hitting guitar shredding. It’s your statement that this, too, is worship. It’s how John Van Deusen worships.

When I was making this record, I was down in an empty tanning bedroom, which was too cold or too hot. It’s the size of most people’s walk-in closets. I would just chase ideas. I would take a lot of risks. I would push everything to the limit. And that’s when I found myself worshiping the most. Nobody else is there. It’s just me and the Holy Spirit. In the tanning bedroom that is not a real studio.

Every day I’d chase another song. I was having so much fun. That’s why the record became so long. It feels incomplete to me if you start taking songs out of it. Because part of what makes it fun is that from point A to point B, if point B is the end of part 2, it feels like a rollercoaster. It has a sense of adventure. That was a very worshipful experience for me.

I love the emphasis on ‘joyful noise,’ which is in the album title and pervades the project in so many ways. It’s so you. Your music is noisy in a good way, but it’s joyful noise. The first song, ‘I Was Made to Praise,’ kicks off the album in that way, and throughout both parts of the album, there are joyful noises of every sort—even frogs singing in marshes.

Opening with “I Was Made to Praise” is like the thesis. When I’m making noise, like literal guitar feedback noise through a fuzz pedal and a delay, I am worshiping. I have a sense that I am doing what I was made to do. And that’s what the frogs are doing when they’re serenading me to sleep.

But also, I like noise music because noise embraces dissonance. And this has been such a process of dissonance for me because I am worshiping while being depressed. I am making music within a genre I don’t like, but trying to make it work. I want the songs to be singable by Brandon Lake, but I also don’t want it to sound anything like Brandon Lake. And then in my mental health struggles, I’m feeling increasingly sensitive to noise pollution.

There are moments on this record where I’m incorporating a field recording of a jet or a train or cars or things that are making terribly dissonant sounds. I’m stealing those sounds and using them for my purposes—and then blending them with sounds that I think God made at the beginning of time. God was like, There’s gonna be a time when man-made, human-made sounds are gonna be so transgressive and so unrelenting, that to sit in a marsh and listen to frogs is gonna be one of the most important and healing things you could do. That’s also why there’s the recording of my son [in “All of Me/All of You”] reciting Psalm 23.

Are you familiar with metamodernism? This album strikes me as a sort of metamodern worship expression. It’s deeply earnest and hopeful, but also playful and evokes (especially in the sound) some of the grunge/alternative angst of ’90s postmodernism.

I would say that song you mentioned—“I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship”—is the metamodern moment on the record. Because it’s sincere. I am truly worshiping. When I recorded it I was like, “Praise you, Jesus.” But I’m also being a little tongue in cheek, a little puckish. I knew what would happen if I titled it “I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship.” Now, also, I sincerely like that original Matt Redman song.

I played at a metamodernism summit a couple years ago. They invited me because they saw my music as metamodern. I’m a very sincere guy, but I also like poking fun at things. I don’t know enough about postmodernism, or modernism in general, to talk a lot about metamodernism. But I did grow up in a very postmodern world of art—music that is about nothing, music that is about the void. When I was younger especially, I was a somewhat cynical person: everything is broken; the government is broken; utopia is impossible. But now I kind of embody both sincerity and the punk contrarian ethic I grew up on.

Speaking of contrarian, what has led you over the last 5 to 10 years to shift to making more explicitly Christian, worshipful music? Yet you’re also still making albums like Anthem Sprinter. Are you intentionally trying to be hard to pin down?

I was told growing up, by my peers and the people who were older than me in the scene, “You just make what you wanna make. Don’t apologize to anybody about it.” I’m still carrying that torch for myself as an artist. I’m just making what I want to make. I love worshiping, and I love making music about Jesus. It is a blissful experience for me to just feel free, like I’m honoring my Creator by making something that I like and that I think brings him pleasure. Because I feel the freedom to release a record like Anthem Sprinter and then release this record, I don’t feel tethered down to whether or not I’m a Christian or a secular artist.

And yet, because our world is so quick to categorize anything that says something loudly, I’ve been categorized really clearly. I am a Christian artist. Whatever that means. Old John would’ve been irritated at that. New John recognizes that I’m a Christian artist because I’m associated with my Lord and my Savior. I literally profess with my mouth that he is my God and my King. That is a badge of honor. Has it closed doors for me? Absolutely. Has my desire to release secular and Christian music simultaneously been a terrible business decision? Probably. But now that I’m releasing a massive worship record, it’s especially going to be clear: “Hey, I’m a Christian artist now, guys. Here I am.”