Chicago’s Detholz! (pronounced “death holes,” of course) have straddled the line between seemingly opposite camps since forming in 1996: Christian and secular music, punk and indie rock, religion and reality.

The band’s highly structured, compartmentalized songwriting garners consistent comparisons to art-punk pioneers Devo, but Jim Cooper draws from much broader influences, including minimalist composers like Phillip Glass and Steve Reich, as well as the Talking Heads.

Cooper’s zeitgeist moment came when he was introduced to hardcore punk. And as a teen growing up in Washington, D.C., in the late ’80s, there was no shortage of brilliant, uncompromising and influential hardcore to be heard.
“That was the music that introduced me to music,” Cooper said. “They just completely changed my life.”

Hardcore is the band’s biggest musical influence, but Christianity is just as central an ideological influence on the band’s work. Cooper and the rest of the band attended Wheaton College, an Evangelical Protestant liberal arts school.

“We all had a cross to bear,” Cooper said. “All of us were really pissed off. All of us came up through Evangelical culture, decided to embrace or reject it based on each member’s perspective.”

Cooper and the band have spent the last 11 years exploring what it means to be religious, mining their experiences for some sort of meaning and explanations for the contradictions they see in religion. The band has termed it “religion” vs. “reality.”

“I’d say we’ve mellowed out quite a bit,” Cooper said. “I’m comfortable with my practices and my faith. It makes me more human. I guess I’m not as angry as I used to be.”

The band was featured in the documentary Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?, a film that features Danielson, Sufjan Stevens and The Staples Singers. The film caught the eye of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy. In 2005, Tweedy asked the band to open for Wilco on its Ghost is Born tour.

“[Tweedy’s] really hard on his fans,” Cooper said. “He takes what he does very seriously. He saw in us a band that was left of center. I think he wanted to use us to challenge the acolytes.”