Releasing three records in a year is a tall order for anyone. When you add in the commitments of a hit podcast, a couple of young children and touring as well, the Gungors' achievement is pretty astonishing. That's before you even consider the quality of the One Wild Life trilogy.
The last album in the series, Body, is released this week. Following on from Soul and Spirit, the final installment keeps the quality high, even as the subject matter subtly changes.
Michael Gungor told me recently: "It starts with birth and ends with death – so it goes through a physical life. There's the development of ego in there, the wrestling with what it means to be alive in a body. That's what the record focuses upon."
The idea of talking about bodies might not be an obvious thing for the average Christian worship album – but as listeners old and new will know, Gungor aren't especially interested in being an average worship band.
In many ways, the final installment is an uncompromising listen. Yes there are the beautiful harmonies we're used to. But the lyrics are at times unsettling, in a way that throws down the gauntlet to the listener. Think you know Christian music? Think again.
I asked Michael where it came from. "It was fun trying to write about the body, physicality... some branches of Christianity especially get very uncomfortable with the body. It's almost like this idea that physicality is somehow less than spiritual reality, that it's this gross, something you have to manage and repress – and sometimes the fruit of that is really dark – when you have a religion that doesn't have a healthy relationship with sexuality and the body it ends up coming our in really dark ways."
This sentiment finds expression on various tracks. "We come from a people with scars, with scars," goes 'Alien Apes', "'cause life on our planet is hard, is hard."
It isn't all challenge. There are moments of sheer exhuberance, such as 'Ego', which could have been written by the late Prince himself, it's so robotically funky.
'Free' is a soulful, uplifting track that looks forward with a positivity that seems to reference the current fractured climate in US politics and society as well as a more eschatological form of hope.
Ultimately, this is an album that asks as many questions as it answers. That feels like a perfect metaphor for Gungor's recent career – rejected by some conservative Christians for their deviation from "orthodoxy" but embraced by an increasing range of people for whom Church has been problematic or downright abusive.
Michael told Christian Today that he wrote about the body to correct some of the damage done by Christian approaches to it over the generations. "One of the major things we wanted to do was honour it," he said, "the dignity and the beauty of physicality and what it means to be a human in a body, what it means to be alive and not to despise our flesh but also, how can you live not owned by it?"
The final, epic, track on the record, called 'The End', recalls themes from a couple of the songs on the earlier albums in the trilogy.
"In my end is my beginning" wrote TS Eliot in Four Quartets. Gungor call this to mind with the closing lyrics of this trilogy of Soul, Spirit and Body. "The time has come, Your body must return to all that is, I hope you lived a life of love and risk, Now welcome home."
A challenging, life-affirming, hopeful listen. Gungor at their best. We await their next move with anticipation.
Follow Andy Walton on Twitter @waltonandy
