The first edition LP comes as a Sub Pop Loser Edition on Coke bottle transparent green double vinyl in a gatefold cover with special inner sleeves and inlay. The album's 14 songs are spread over the first three LP sides, as side 4 of the album contains an etching. With "Death Jokes", New York City-based Damon McMahon turns away from himself and directly faces the world with his spiritual reflections and meditations for the first time since founding the Amen Dunes project in 2006. The album is also a drastic turn musically and thematically, rooted in the electronic music of raves and rap music that he grew up with but never imagined he could make. Through samples and lyrics, it comes across as a devastating electronic essay on America's culture of violence, dominance and destructive individualism. Work on Death Jokes began just weeks before news of the pandemic first broke in the winter of 2019; it was completed three years later. The album's meaning shifted as the pandemic progressed, first as a reflection on our attachment to form and to ourselves, then as a solemn indictment of our culture's blind spots, when we misjudge and attack, when egocentrism and complacency masquerade as morality. Death Jokes is Amen Dunes' first album since 2018's Freedom, which Pitchfork called a "best album of the decade."
