The kit is gone and you feel it in your chest before you register it consciously. BIG|BRAVE open in grief or in hope with sustained guitar drone and Liam Andrews’ bass carrying the rhythm alone, and the architecture holds. It takes a minute to understand what you’re listening to. Whether that minute is unsettling or clarifying depends on how much you trusted the drums to begin with.
Andrews has toured with Wattie and Ball for years. This is his first studio record with the band, tracked live, and his bass is doing structural and emotional work simultaneously. On what may be the kindest way to leave it plods and churns in the low end while Wattie’s voice traces elaborate melodic lines above it, resigned and unhurried, circling “Trade this body for a piece of ease” with the patience of someone who has been thinking that thought a long time. There’s something hymnal in the construction. Folk music filtered through noise and out the other side.
a shape of shame is the moment the record announces what it’s actually capable of. Dry acoustic guitar strums ring out above the feedback with a metallic clarity that feels almost misplaced, and then the noise rises and takes them. Wattie shifts from humming to a full howl and the song’s structure works in reverse, building toward what functions like a chorus only to distort it as it peaks. At its apex the effect lands somewhere near Björk‘s Pluto, visceral and destabilising, the lyric “my mind works me into a restless state” delivered at precisely the moment the surrounding sound becomes most extreme.
verdure is the centrepiece, and easily the most harrowing stretch on the record. A heavily distorted bass signal and the slow hollow knock of a tapped pickguard feeding through a guitar pickup form the entire rhythmic spine. As the loop cycles it begins to resemble a malfunctioning synth, a mistake that has calcified into something canonical. The track escalates into full harsh noise, the source material so obscured it barely registers as guitar anymore. Wattie’s voice holds at the centre before being consumed entirely. The title reaches back to the band’s 2014 debut Feral Verdure, and whether that feels like bookkeeping or something weightier is a question the record leaves open.
Then an uttering of antipathy, Auto-Tune applied to Wattie’s vocals as she turns condemnation entirely on herself: “God only blames me / you only blame me / only blame me / blame me.” The effect is crystalline and psychedelic, voice glowing through the surrounding feedback and bass. When the processing drops in the coda, the shift is stark. What it implies about self-directed blame — whether it’s natural or engineered, whether the two are even different — the song doesn’t answer.
holding tongue, the instrumental interlude, is where the distortion abates and the amplifiers breathe, Andrews’ bass plodding through the low register in ambiguous calm. It’s one of the record’s best moments. What it makes room for, and what arrives immediately after, is verdure. The sequencing is deliberate.
The record ends with Wattie asking a question dressed up as a koan: “When does one feel the most, is it in grief or is it in hope?” The final line is “I could try again.” The drones are still going when she says it.
in grief or in hope is out now via Thrill Jockey.
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