{"title":"Snakeskin","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"they-kept-our-photographs-2","title":"They Kept Our Photographs","description":"\u003cp\u003eThey Kept Our Photographs covers a lot of ground. Lyrically, singer-songwriter Julia Sabra delivers her most vivid and visceral work yet. Musically, producer\/multi-instrumentalist Fadi Tabbal adds excursions into hyperpop and electronica to the duo's industrial-drone-ambient palette. The pair's enduring friendship translates into a rare kind of synergy, recalling collaborations such as Virginia Astley and Ryuichi Sakamoto's, Broadcast's Trish Keenan and James Cargill's, or Angelo Baladamenti and Julee Cruise's work on Twin Peaks.\n\nBeyond the sonic parallels, Snakeskin's world shares with Twin Peaks an unsettling eerie quality. Angelic celestial beauty enclosing darkness and rot. It's a world where \"fairies shimmer\" and \"church bells make no sound\"; \"cats breed and die\" and \"fireworks fall to the sea\". It's ethereal and otherworldly, yet deeply grounded in the reality of the duo's life in Beirut. A reality perhaps best illustrated by \"Waiting\", in which Sabra borrows Etel Adnan's text \"To Be In A Time Of War\". Tabbal's synths tick like clocks and ring like bells as Sabra monotones enumerations of mundane acts of life during wartime - the automatisms pile up, the words interlace, everything blurs.\nSabra's own words skew more poetic but are still granular and precise, full of visceral and intimate detail: \"Hollow-eyed, blind in the sun \/ My teeth sink into my jaw \/ My cheeks burn into my tongue\/ My fingers dance around the gun\".Tabbal's production is positively alive, from the glassy ambience of \"In My Life\" to the snarling warped drums of \"Sunburst\". There are surprising pop moments too, like \"Homecoming\", its auto-tune and highlife-like percussion recalling the experimental pop stylings of Caroline Polachek.\n\nSnakeskin's self-titled debut (2022) had come on the heels of the Beirut port explosion. The city and its people were changed forever. Sabra and Tabbal took a scalpel to its heart and dragged out its content, transmuting the death, the grief, the violence into a stunning piece of music.TKOP carries on that work at a similarly distressing time, as it was written in parallel to the genocide in Gaza and the violence enacted against South Lebanon. And yet the album is lyrically bookended by love songs. In \"In My Life\", Sabra repeats \"I will love\", over and over again. In \"Anyway\", she makes good on that promise: \"I fell for you \/ fell in way too deep\". The title's \"photographs\" read like the archives of a post-apocalyptic world, records of what we've left behind. And what is left but love?\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Mais um Discos","offers":[{"title":"LP","offer_id":50421935997259,"sku":"2223100","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/test_aa1ca792_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726761544"},{"product_id":"we-live-in-sand","title":"We Live In Sand","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"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.\u2028\u2028There 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. Second single “Blindsided” delivers the record’s poppiest —and perhaps most devastating— moment. The album’s central thesis can be found in the chorus: \"How to love in the face of this death?\" The duo consistently mine new ways —lyrical and musical— to reflect the duality of their reality. The inescapable darkness and the unwavering love. The bleakness and the beauty. 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”. Indeed, Pitchfork described his most recent solo album, I Recognize You From My Sketches, as “his most texturally diverse record yet.” The title track recalls the duo’s earliest collaborations: minimal, nursery-rhyme-like, haunting. “There was a boy \/ hair white as chalk \/ who went to bed \/ beneath the rocks.” By the time closer “In the Pines” arrives, there is no resolution. Only smoke, ruin, and the sound of crickets. “I thought I was fine,” Sabra sings — the kind of line that lands hardest when everything has already been lost. 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 us ever more affecting transmissions from the archive.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ruptured","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":53290880270667,"sku":"R4651-4057","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/weliveinsand_front_3000_1.png?v=1756740793"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/collections\/snakeskin.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}