Karim Lakhdar has one word for how much the person he lost shaped him as a musician. “Everything.” He doesn’t elaborate immediately. He doesn’t need to.
Atsuko Chiba, the Montreal five-piece who built their reputation on pounding, distortion-heavy rock, released their fourth album, also titled Atsuko Chiba, on April 24th via Mothland. It is their quietest record, their most restrained, and their most devastating. Thirty-two minutes of trip-hop pulse, ambient drift, and chamber pop restraint, built in headphones, generated from free jams, and shaped by grief that refused to stay private.
Two songs at the album’s centre, “Pretense” and “Future Ways,” address the death of someone Lakhdar describes as “a friend, a brother, a mentor, a fellow cosmonaut.” The songs didn’t arrive through deliberate intention. They came out of a jam, before anyone had time to decide whether the moment belonged on a record. “You never truly decide these things, to be quite honest,” Lakhdar says. “Those songs were written out of jams and those were the first words to come out. I remember feeling quite emotional while going through the first iterations. It wasn’t something I wanted to discuss, but it made its way out. I’ve learned not to mess with that over the years.”
Lakhdar has written about the songs at length. “‘Pretense’ confronts loss and my perspective on an impossible situation with someone deeply close to me,” he writes. “It traces a profound depression, a daily struggle to remain alive. ‘Wanted out, couldn’t wait’ echoes his constant proximity to the idea of ending it.” He describes someone with a brilliant, restless mind, always moving, always with an answer, never quite at rest. “In the end, I am left standing before the grave, realizing this is not something you move on from. It stays with you. That day, I lost someone irreplaceable: a friend, a brother, a mentor, a fellow cosmonaut.”
“Future Ways” follows directly, its krautrock urgency carrying a different emotional register. “The title feels inevitable: this is life after death,” Lakhdar writes. The song closes with a repeating mantra, Go wild, stay forward, going up, which he describes not as resolution but as commitment. “It becomes a reminder that life is still here, still unfolding, and that I must remain an active participant in it, careful not to disappear into the weight of what was lost.”
Putting the band’s own name on that weight, on all of it, is itself a statement. Choosing to go self-titled this deep into a career is something most bands either do instinctively at the start or never do at all. Atsuko Chiba waited until they had something to say. “After a certain amount of years as a band, we were comfortable enough to say, ‘this is who we are,'” Lakhdar says. “The idea of Atsuko Chiba encompasses more than just music for us. This album is a culmination of that experience.”
That experience includes a decisive pivot away from the distorted rock that built their name. Previous records leaned on The Mars Volta, Rage Against the Machine, At the Drive-In. This one pulls from Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, Mark Lanegan’s Bubblegum, and Beak>’s >>>>. “Both those records feel so heavy and intense but rarely use distortion and loud rock moments to get that across,” Lakhdar says. “It’s really about the tone and sonic placement of each element.” Bands like Portishead, long a touchstone for the group’s blending of live instrumentation and electronics, were in the background too; the difference is that this time, the sound finally caught up with the influence.
The shift wasn’t declared, it revealed itself. The band, Lakhdar alongside Kevin McDonald, David Palumbo, Anthony Piazza, and Eric Schafhauser, wrote wearing headphones, everyone plugged in together, isolated in sound. “You don’t need to push distortion or volume just to cut through loud amps and drums,” Lakhdar explains. “Everything is already balanced, so it opens up space to explore textures you wouldn’t necessarily land on in a more traditional setup.” Two heavier tracks that emerged from the sessions, “Pope’s Cocaine” and “Climax Therapy,” were eventually released separately, giving the band the distance to understand what the album actually was. “From there, we could really start carving out the sonic world that this album lives in. It kind of revealed itself step by step in a pretty organic way. It’s not like we ever said ‘no distortion.’ It just wasn’t where we were naturally going.”
With all five members sharing production duties, the process was genuinely collective. After 15 years of writing together, disagreement doesn’t feel like conflict. “We pretty much always assume the best in each other,” Lakhdar says. “Everyone is approaching disagreement from a place of curiosity and wanting what’s best for the song. So even when we don’t agree, it never really feels like conflict; it’s just part of the conversation. That kind of tension around different aspects of a song usually ends up pushing things in a better direction.”
The recognition has come. They won GAMIQ’s Post-Rock/Post-Punk Album of the Year for Water, It Feels Like It’s Growing in 2023. They’re opening for Goat at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal this July. “It’s always nice to feel supported and recognized by the scene we are in,” Lakhdar says, “but I wouldn’t say it changes anything for us. Either way, getting together to create music is at the centre of our friendship, so that will continue regardless.”
The five of them have been friends for over 20 years. They cook together. They take vacations together. The band is, as Lakhdar sees it, just another extension of a family that was already there. But the album sitting underneath all of that warmth is something more complicated, a record about losing someone irreplaceable, about what it means to keep going when keeping going is the only option left.
“I am not okay,” Lakhdar wrote. “I’m only learning new ways to carry it.”
Atsuko Chiba is out now via Mothland. The band play MTelus with GOAT on 4 July.
Photos – Anthony Piazza
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