Montréal-based outfit Atsuko Chiba — Karim Lakhdar (vocals, guitar, synths), Kevin McDonald (synths, guitar), Eric Schafhauser (guitar, synths), David Palumbo (bass, bass VI, vocals) and Anthony Piazza (drums, electronic drums, percussion) — have firmly established a sound that’s a cohesive and hypnotic blend of post-rock, prog and krautock paired with offbeat songwriting through the release of 2013’s Jinn, 2019’s Trace and 2023’s Water, It Feels Like It’s Growing.
The Montréal-based quintet’s self-titled fourth album was released last Friday through Mothland. The album sees the band rethinking their sound and approach, drawing inspiration from Mark Lanegan, Beak>, Talk Talk, Can and Portishead, all while retaining elements of their long-established post-punk fueled psychedelia.
Though the band has been introducing more vocals and lyrics with every subsequent release, their fourth album sees the band further wielding vocals and lyrics as a well to delve deeper into their intrinsic meta. The result is an album that’s one-part gritty post-rock and one-part intimate hymn to self-reflection with its moodiness amplifying a communal desire to eschew recurrent patterns for the sake of comfort, approval and longevity.
The band decided upon a freeform creative process, which could only be achieved by pursuing a hands-on approach, and with each member sharing the roles of engineer and producer,
“Overall, Atsuko Chiba is an exercise in patience and restraint. The mood of the album is melancholic, at times feeling optimistic, while other times feeling almost hopeless—there’s a sense of loss and disconnect, but also a glimmer of hope,” the band explains. “It is the most vulnerable and stripped down music we have ever made. It is a departure from the aggressive and distorted guitar sound we’ve relied on over the years. We also chose to make it a self-titled record which is something we battled with. We went with Atsuko Chiba because its overarching themes relate to us in a deep way. The material on this album presents itself as a mosaic of our interests and experiences as a band. We let the music guide us every step of the way, never forcing our will upon it, instead paying attention to what it was telling us and what we could do to further support it.
At first, we would come into the studio without a plan, just playing and recording the entire time, with no pressure as to a specific outcome: free jams during which we were just generating grooves, parts, and moments that felt good to us. We also put limitations, cutting out certain instruments from session to session, opening us to new options and pathways, generating new sound palettes. A lot of attention was put into creating space and holding back from always going for big epic moments. We focussed on keeping things simple and using dynamics to create exciting moments instead of relying on loud guitars to get us there. This album features a lot of auxiliary percussion, synthesizers, and keyboards, and places a strong emphasis on vocals. We explored acoustic guitars and created many custom percussive sounds by layering two or three sources together, also programming rhythms using samplers and drum machines.”
The album includes the previous released album opening track “Retention” “Torn” and its two latest single “Pretense” and “Future Ways,” which sequentially follow each other on the new album. “Pretense” is a brooding yet lush and melodic mediation on loss and grief, seemingly rooted in the lived-in experience of losing someone dear. Anchored around a motorik groove, “Future Ways” is a mind-bending, krautrock-inspired bit of psych rock that feels both uneasy and urgent simultaneously. “Future Ways” is meant to evoke invasive thoughts racing through one’s mind, as they attempt to make sense of foreseen tragedy. Impassioned vocals dance and dart around fuzzy and distortion pedaled guitars and glistening synth arpeggios, leading to the song’s coda and uplifting mantra: Go wild/Stay Forward/Going up . .
“’Pretense’ confronts loss and my perspective on an impossible situation with someone deeply close to me. It traces a profound depression, a daily struggle to remain alive, shaped by the belief that something inside was irrevocably broken, beyond diagnosis or repair,” Atsuko Chiba’s Karim Lakhdar explains. “‘Wanted out, couldn’t wait‘ echoes his constant proximity to the idea of ending it. Life felt unbearably tense, with no center to return to. He had a brilliant mind, always in motion—always an answer, always a reason—yet never 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. I am not okay… I’m only learning new ways to carry it. That day, I lost someone irreplaceable: a friend, a brother, a mentor, a fellow cosmonaut.
“’Future Ways’ is intrinsically linked to ‘Pretense,'” Lakhdar continues. “They were initially conceived as a single piece. The title feels inevitable: this is life after death. It asks how we continue, how we carry what has already happened. ‘This light, it grows in spite of you‘ speaks to taking what I learned from him and using it as forward motion. In this sense, he never fully disappears, he continues through me. I learned how to listen, how to see, how to approach life and music from shifting vantage points, to question, to push beyond what is given. The second verse reflects how, even in moments of profound despair, he remained deeply charismatic, silver-tongued to the point that I believed everything he said. He predicted what would happen, how he would be seen, how people would respond. There was a rare coexistence of hysteria and startling clarity, and through it all I am left confused, powerless, unable to intervene. In the third verse, a mantra repeats as a way of keeping spirits up. It’s a commitment to forward motion. 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.”
The accompanying visual features footage of the band in the studio goofing during the writing and recording process and during candid moments while on tour and outside of beloved local venue L’Esco.
