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LP
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BNSD 095LP
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$25.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 10/10/2025
This is the third volume in the Corrosion Series, a collaborative effort by Beacon Sound and Ruptured. "This time there's no escape," goes Snakeskin's "October Sun," the lead single from their third album We Live In Sand. A looped vocal motif and elegiac organ circle around Julia Sabra's otherworldly voice as she sings of ringing drones and ominous echoes. Since their inception, the Lebanese duo's music has served as a kind of real-time archive of their country's turmoil. We Live In Sand is their darkest, rawest release yet -- written in October 2024, just as the Israeli war on Gaza fully spread to Lebanon and finally reached Beirut. The band's 2022 self-titled debut was shaped by the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion. They Kept Our Photographs (2024) was written in the early months of the war on Gaza. But on We Live In Sand, the violence is no longer at a distance. It is here, now. The war has reached their doorstep. There is no soft entry point this time. Opener "Ready" begins mid-collapse: fractured, glitchy, elemental. Fadi Tabbal's production cracks and rumbles like tectonic plates, while Sabra sings through autotune -- ethereal, almost post-human: "There's life inside my bones." It's a stunning paradox -- a song about birth, caught in the middle of destruction. Hope, fragile and flickering, seeps through the rubble. Snakeskin has always thrived in extremes, but here the contrast is sharpened to a knife's edge. The record's second half moves into deeper, darker waters. "Olive Groves" and "Black Water" are sparse, mournful incantations -- too haunted for full sentences. Sabra has grown increasingly adept at squeezing vivid imagery and meaning from succinct lines. Tabbal's production is equally evocative, from the '80s-melancholic-pop of "The Fear" to piano dirge "In The Pines." The title track recalls the duo's earliest collaborations: minimal, nursery-rhyme-like, haunting. Where They Kept Our Photographs ended on a hopeful note, We Live In Sand is resolute in its realism. It's Snakeskin at their most urgent, and their most essential -- bearing witness to impossible events. What it feels like to wait, to love, to grieve, and to keep living while the world falls apart. Thankfully, Snakeskin persevere, sending listeners ever more affecting transmissions from the archive.
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