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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London‘s Automotion, AKA Jesse Hitchman (vocals/guitar), Lennon Gallagher (vocals/guitar), Otis Eatwell-Hurst (drums) and Luke Chin-Joseph (bass), have followed up their debut EP In Motion with a new release that builds upon its ideas. The band identify a multifaceted approach as a key component of their work, and Ecstatic Oscillations sees them lean into dynamic changes. As the title suggests, each song oscillates at its own unique frequency, the fluctuations between tracks lending the EP an almost collage-like style. Latest single ‘Desire’ offers one such example, itself a track of peaks and troughs which plays off the understated, downbeat vocals with real energy and weight.

Ecstatic Oscillations is out now and available from streaming services.

Jackie Cohen – Ghost Story

Back in 2020, amid a personal crisis, Jackie Cohen found herself asking whatever powers might exist for a sign that things would work out alright in the end. At that moment, a large moth swooped in and committed self-immolation via the oil lamp at Cohen’s side. The incident came to inform Pratfall, an album recently released via Earth Libraries which proffers the value of giving oneself up to tension and turmoil rather than fighting against it. To reach for catharsis, find sublime release in motion, heat and light. Single ‘Ghost Story’ weaves an entirely different story to that of the moth, but the abrupt and decisive beauty of its act remains. “It’s a song about annihilation and acceptance,” Cohen explains. “It’s hopeless and serene… Essentially, if you wanna wake up, you’re gonna have to jump.”

Pratfall is out now via Earth Libraries and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Marlais – Out of the Window

Recording under the moniker Marlais, Michael Culme-Seymour draws upon British and Irish folk traditions to create reimaginings of old songs. Tales he can step inside and live within, if only for a moment. Out via Treibender Teppich Records, new album Stream of Forms is a collection of such reworkings, its traditional instruments supported by digital choirs and electronics. Single ‘Out of the Window’ demonstrates how Marlais evades any sense of anachronism or irony in this practise, the sound coalescing into a convincing whole, the emotions explored readily transposed onto a new place and period. “Time and time again I am amazed at the cut-throat nature of traditional songs,” Culme-Seymour explains. “How hopes and dreams can be dashed in one line or couplet.”

Melanie MacLaren & Lorkin O’Reilly – Clearance Aisle

Ahead of a forthcoming EP, and with a joint tour of the UK and Ireland on the horizon, songwriters Melanie MacLaren and Lorkin O’Reilly have released new single, ‘Clearance Aisle’. It’s a duet which allows both artists to display their storytelling chops and knack for conjuring intimate emotion. The track is set within two distinct spaces, the mundanity of real life, as represented by the Walmart clearance aisle, but also the less tangible plane of hopes and regrets. Just how pleasant and welcoming either of these places prove varies day to day, but the truth at the heart of ‘Clearance Aisle’ is that we have no choice but to inhabit both, day after day.

Queen Kwong – Sad Man

This summer saw Queen Kwong release their latest album, Couples Only, on Sonic Ritual. It’s a record which sees Carré Kwong Callaway confront the despair of loss and deception with caustic anger, its ominous nocturnal tones conjuring a noir-like combo of swagger and danger. Single ‘Sad Man’ is the perfect introduction, showing off both the wrath and wry humour of the album, and a new video directed by Joe Cardamone and starring Johnny Knoxville as the titular sad man takes inspiration from Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant to further elevate this heady blend.

But I just wanna grow up
I’m too old for this shit
Paying rent by selling guitars and DJing shitty bars
I don’t want to be another sad man in another sad band Dropping the same names
Playing the same games
I just wanna grow up
He’s a sad sad man

Couples Only is out now via Sonic Ritual and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Raavi – no bodies

“Its nods to the 90s are evocative without feeling derivative, and for all its blunt honesty and self-deprecating worry, it rocks hard enough to bring a genuine sense of catharsis.” That’s how we described ‘Lazy Susan‘ from Raavi‘s last EP, It Grows on Trees, back in April. Since then, Raavi Sita has wasted no time in working on new material. Released as part of the Hardly Art Records 15th anniversary single series, the project has just unveiled brand new single ‘no bodies’. A meditation on the pitfalls of striving for success in the music industry, where reaching the top of one ladder merely sees you emerge at the bottom of a bigger, more dauting climb.

Remember Sports – Leap Day

Philadelphia‘s Remember Sports returned this month with Leap Day, a brand new four-song EP on Father/Daughter Records. With a slightly less frantic tempo than the sound they’ve perfected over four records, the release offers a more reflective, patient side to the band, though do not be fooled. The emotional ferocity and immediacy that has so long marked Remember Sports has not been lost but redirected. Their energies channelled into a newly layered sound with drum machine, electronics and distortion complimenting the pop rock anthems we’ve come to love.

Leap Day is out now via Father/Daughter Records and you can get it from the Remember Sports Bandcamp page.

Ruby Gill – I’m gonna die with this frown on my face

Last year we wrote about South Africa-born, Melbourne/Naarm-based artist Ruby Gill, describing single ‘You Should Do This For a Living‘ as “setting its sights on the overbearing, patronising force of male entitlement,” and “aris[ing] from a very personal situation but end[ing] up speaking to a far wider experience.” Gill has now released her debut full-length I’m gonna die with this frown on my face, and the title track shows that the same combination of fury and compassion underlines these songs too. “I’m gonna die with this frown on my face / they’re going to lower me down,” she sings in the opening lines. “Asking why I’ve been this angry all of my days / even when you came around / and I don’t have the answers.” Check out the video directed and edited by Samuel H. Galloway below:

I’m gonna die with this frown on my face is out now and available from the usual places.

Yara Asmar – it’s always october on sunday

Yara Asmar is a multi-instrumentalist, video artist and puppeteer based in Beirut who recently unveiled her debut release on Brighton label Hive Mind Records. Titled Home Recordings 2018 – 2021, the album is a collection of pieces Asmar recorded to cassette and her phone in the last few years, utilising a range of instruments from piano and synths to deconstructed music boxes and an old accordion she found in her grandparents’ attic. Add in field recordings of Lebanese hymns sung in churches across the country and you’ve got an ambient/classical collection quite unlike any other. Opening track ‘it’s always october on sunday’ is a good place to start, its pensive atmosphere capturing something about the record as a whole. As the label put it, “The atmosphere of melancholy that pervades the album should be familiar to anyone living in the twenty-first century.”

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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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We have followed Max Holmquist’s career with some admiration, first as South of Lincoln and then Great American Desert (which we wrote about here). Holmquist is now in a band called Oquoa and they have made their album available for free. Their sound is somewhere between Water Liars and Hip Hatchet, a restrained folky rock which has darkness and grief lurking just beneath the surface. Check out ‘Cigarettes’ below.

You can download the album for free here.

A Singer of Songs – From Hello to Goodbye

Barcelona-based folkster A Singer of Songs is back with From Hello to Goodbye, another album chock full of lovely lo-fi tunes recorded in his home studio. Some tracks are delicate (‘Sand in my Shoes’), some are a little more rambunctious (such as opener ‘Another Way of Saying Hello’), and all seem to have the curious sensation of being between times, as small moments of the past are opening up in the present. Maybe it’s the use of violins, trumpets and pianos or the slightly European street music vibe on tracks like ‘I’ll Follow You’. Maybe it’s just the cartographic artwork.

A Singer of Songs is attached to the Son Canciones label, and you can buy the album now from the A Singer of Songs’ Bandcamp page.

Steve Palmer – Unblinking Sun

Steve Palmer is a “Fahey nut and guitar obsessive” who has taken lessons from American Primitivism legend Peter Lang. It is perhaps unsurprising then that Palmer makes guitar driven instrumental music that combines the finger-picking of traditional US folk with more modern sounds of drone and krautrock. The result is a collection of long, complex acoustic songs peppered with ambient and psychedelic flourishes that lend a whole jazzy improvisation feel to things.

Unblinking Sun is being released by Dying for Bad Music.

Ezkiel – A New Mask

Ezkiel is Louis Monroe from New Orleans. A New Mask is his debut release and presents four dark and cinematic folk songs which explore the themes of change and rebirth. The EP was developed almost by accident, as part of a music production class that Monroe was taking at university. Monroe himself was required to production on a singer-songwriter record, but the recording artist pulled out last minute. This forced Monroe himself to record something and A New Mask was the end result. The tracks were recorded at home and have that intimate bedroom pop vibe which I really like. Grab it now via the Ezkiel Bandcamp page.

Charlie Rayne – Wider Waters

Last but not least is Wider Waters, a brilliant album by Beirut-based Charlie Rayne. Rayne makes glorious Dylan-style folk songs which twist and turn with a remarkable lyrical flow. The focus is very much on Rayne’s passionate deliver and the stories held within, the bare bones guitars providing the perfect counterbalance. If Sweden were to stake a claim on Bob Dylan reincarnate with Kristian Mattson, then I think we have to say that Beirut now have themselves a real rival. Get it via Bandcamp.

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