Next month sees Interbellum return with a brand new record, Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night, which continues the exploration of such themes with an ever-evolving style. Where the previous album leant toward pop sensibilities, Our House turns toward what Mattar calls a “more organic and anarchic sound.” One crafted around acoustic guitar but fleshed out with a myriad of supporting elements from densely layered instrumentation to sound samples and field recordings, with drummer Pascal Semerdjian (of Lebanese dream pop outfit Postcards) offering contributions from his hometown of Ain Aar. The fluid, collage-like style which emerges feels at once haunted by the past and permeable to the outside world. One singularly geared towards evoking the complex manifestations of memory and trauma with which the album deals.

For Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night is a record of intergenerational reach. A story of violence and ghosts in the aftermath of a civil war, where the lingering vibrations of the past are not only felt in the present but actively shaping the world as it exists today. “Within this framework, ghosts represent trauma,” Mattar explains. “The intergenerational transmission of the phantom—a loss that is untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual assimilative work of mourning.” The collective trauma of a country still submerged beneath its history.

Today we have the pleasure of sharing lead single, ‘Partners’. A single which serves as the ideal introduction to the new Interbellum sound. Because for all its ambition and scope, the record foregoes none of the intimacy which lends such concepts their weight. ‘Partners’ offers a glimpse of human life as lived from within the sweep of history, where people not only continue despite the uncertainty and spectres and troubling signs but look for order within the apparent chaos. Any way to square the political whole with their own small lives. Watch the video by Camille Cabbabé below:

I tried to remind you, you couldn’t recall
Did it happen that way? Did it happen at all?
So I do the remembering
Give names to nameless things
I’ve got archiving fever and I’m feeling for walls

But the light is still on in the hall

Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night is set for release on April 7th and you can pre-order it now from the Interbellum Bandcamp page.

Photo by Rachel Tabet

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Tracklisting:

Restorations – Nonbeliever
Goshen Electric Co. – The Grey Tower
Horse Culture – Follow
Yowler – Where Is My Light?
Desert Liminal – Gauze Cave
Anamon – In 3
Adeline Hotel – Lightning
Lea Thomas – Upstream
Scott Orr – No Phone
Advance Base – Christmas in Nightmare City
Blue Wilson – Golden Eyes
The Sofas – Nothing Major
Lazy Legs – Nosebleed
All Boy/All Girl – Bomb
Strange Ranger – New Hair
Elly Swope – Idea
Dweller – Running
Will Henriksen – Halo
Knuckle Pups – Bottom Baby
Ian Wayne – Guessing
Massage – Crying Out Loud
Recluse Raccoon – Mother America
Interbellum – Ink
Marc Ferrino – Like a Spark
Katie Kuffel – As the Crow Flies
Emily Brown – Sometimes
KASHKA – Holding Steady
Philippe Bronchtein – Me and the Moon
Spencer Segelov – Sacred Songs
Annie Dressner – Fades Away
Belaver – Grave Robber
Of The Valley – Ride Alone
Hour – Give thanks in a special way

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Fittingly for such weighty themes, Interbellum takes an experimental route, the sound operating as a kind of analogy for the complexity and strangeness of human experience. “Apocalyptic imagery—real, imagined and figurative—permeates the album, and the instrumentation follows suit, warping, distorting and folding on itself,” Mattar explains. “The record plays like a broken music box, its kaleidoscopic melodic songs disjointed and smeared by noise, dissonance and processed sounds.”

Opening track ‘Distortion’ makes this clear both in sound and lyrics, opening with intimate, stripped back folk that grows misshapen, ending as distorted drone. “Feel it all slipping,” Mattar sings, and it is easy to follow him. “Unraveling once again.” The idea of deterioration is one of the persistent features of what is an otherwise diverse album, from the upbeat indie rock swagger of ‘Another Day’ and ‘It’s All Over’ to the nostalgic ‘Ready to Dissolve’ and morose ‘First Light’, the songs continually threaten to break apart and denature, as though some great force is straining their very structure.

‘Ink’ opens like a toy-box lullaby, kicking into slow, shuffled life with a near clockwork rhythm. The effect is that of a music box grown sentient, breaking from the programmed jingle to communicate more sincerely, with human heart. The lyrics deal with the accumulation of the past—items and objects, images and snippets of remembered moments—a mass of discrete things with which we must build the mosaic of our memory.

“well that’s where it started
and I guess that’s how it ends
rummaging through mystical ruins
rescuing tokens of friendships lost

if the past is a jigsaw puzzle
these are its pieces lying about
I’ve kept restaurant bills and ticket stubs
but most of the ink has rubbed out”

‘PQRST’ is a sweeping example of pop-inspired drone, not unlike the warm melancholy of Talons’, before ‘For Air’ emerges from within its own cloud of reverb as something more assertive, the vocals remaining simple as the drums and synths drive on with newfound energy. ‘Some Ghosts’ reverts to a more traditional folk sound, with it’s patient cadence and earnest vocals, before closing track, ‘Weight of Winter’ ties things together with a wistful indie rock ramble.

“we swear not to speak of the past in present tense
there are no new ways of living
there’s only new mornings to set our lives against

gathering our loose ends
we plotted our escape
and spoke of our dreams again
but they’ve had patents pending
since they’ve started taking shape”

Dead Pets, Old Griefs is out now via Ruptured and you can grab it from the Interbellum Bandcamp page.

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