Over recent years, Exeter emo outfit Soot Sprite have been making emotionally charged and cathartic songs which refuse to surrender to the accepted logic of things. Take, for example, it I Went Swimming / Home Among Your Bones with its eschewal of unhealthy expectations within relationships, or Poltergeist and its defiant self-acceptance. This spring sees the release of a brand new full-length Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon on Specialist Subject Records, and as the title suggests, lead Elise Cook and co. continue their mission. A call to arms to fight against the forces that make contemporary life so difficult, and a reminder of the radical potential within empathy and community. As Cook puts it:
[The album is] about facing the endless horrors of the world and remembering to pay attention to the good. People on the ground, activism, and remembering that we shouldn’t be hardened by everything we witness or we can lose empathy. And it feels like without empathy we’ll never be able to achieve class consciousness, and lose our sense of community.
Pulling no punches with its observations, lead single ‘All My Friends Are Depressed’ plays like a dispatch from the trenches of the present. An attempt to shake life into an exhausted population beaten down by work and expectations so that we might act to shape a better world. The song represents “my observation of the mental health crisis we’re in, how widespread it feels and how sociopolitical factors are playing such a huge part,” Cook explains. “It’s also a reminder to myself that I need to stop distracting myself from my issues and try and change something or face things or nothing will happen and I’ll never shake off the episode.”
Wield Your Hope Like A Weapon is out on the 16th May via Specialist Subject Records and you can pre-order it now from the Soot Sprite Bandcamp page.
