Back to the Altar

“Dusty Bibles,” Queen’s 2025 breakthrough, was written as an address to someone else – a generic, unnamed believer whose faith had gone cold, the kind of song built to needle a congregation into self-examination from a safe third-person distance. “Back to the Altar,” released September 11, drops that distance. The verses are first person throughout, and the specific failure named isn’t a dusty Bible on a shelf, it’s Queen describing his own year of writing and performing songs about faith while privately feeling disconnected from the thing he was singing about.

That shift matters because it removes the easiest criticism of the earlier song – that it was simple enough to let any listener assume it was about somebody else. Co-written again with Dylan Thomas, John Michael Howell, and Zac Lawson, the arrangement keeps the same unpolished, acoustic-forward indie-folk sound that made “Dusty Bibles” a Hot 100 entry and a Dove nomination, but the plainness reads differently applied to a confession instead of an accusation. A finger pointed at the listener is an easy sell; a finger pointed at the songwriter himself, delivered in the same plainspoken register, is a harder, more interesting thing to pull off.

It doesn’t fully match its predecessor’s hook strength – “Dusty Bibles” had a chorus built to be sung by a room; this one is more verse-driven and harder to remember after one listen. But as a statement of where Queen’s writing is headed, turning the critique inward rather than outward, it’s the more mature record. 7.8/10.

Hero image: Josiah Queen, December 2024, by SoundExchange, licensed under CC BY 3.0.