The neofolk band's final album remains 2022's 'With Open Arms'
Sean Ragon, the founding frontman of New York neofolk band Cult of Youth, has died.
The band announced the news on social media, writing, "It is with a heavy heart that I say, Sean Ragon has left this mortal coil. Thank you to all of you for the support over the years. Love will prevail."
No cause of death has been reported at this time. Ragon was 45.
Ragon was born in Cambridge, MA, and got his start musically playing in various local punk bands like Class Action and Wreckage in the late '90s — a key influence for Cult of Youth, which the musician said in an interview with The Agit Reader was "definitely in the spirit of the first wave of punk and the spirit of the first wave of post-punk as well."
Cult of Youth began as Ragon's solo project a decade or so later (when he also opened Brooklyn record store Heaven Street Records, which became Nexus Records in 2025 after having been renamed Material World Records in 2016 [via Stereogum]), drawing on the work of pagan folk acts, goth and punk bands, as well as industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle. They became a full band by 2011, when they signed to Sacred Bones Records for the release of their self-titled debut album.
The group's two follow-ups on the label, 2012's Love Will Prevail and 2014's Final Days, were critically acclaimed, while the band's sound gradually evolved into psych rock-adjacent expansiveness, even adding a fifth member at one point.
Ragon went on to pursue plenty of side projects once action quieted down on the Cult of Youth front in the latter half of the 2010s, but returned with a final album under the band's name, With Open Arms, in 2022, which was cobbled together with the assistance of his Psychic TV bandmate Jeffer Berner (Ragon served as a touring member in 2016) from 2015 sessions recorded in the mountains of Vermont.
