BIG|BRAVE have announced their tenth full-length album, in grief or in hope, due June 12th via Thrill Jockey, alongside their first single and video, the ineptitude for mutual discernment. The video was created by guitarist Mat Ball, with colour correction by filmmaker Stacy Lee.
It’s a track that pits heavy guitar tides against Robin Wattie’s unwavering vocal, and it signals a marked shift for the Montreal trio. Where last year’s OST found them at their most stripped-back and austere, in grief or in hope, moves towards denser, more guitar-saturated ground. Longtime touring bassist Liam Andrews (MY DISCO, Aicher) joins Wattie and Ball in the studio for the first time, and the results — recorded live — harness the band’s formidable performance energy into compositions that veer between gargantuan distortion and moments of exposed tenderness.
“I wanted to explore catchy, melodic phrasing weaved throughout the intensity of the instrumentation and droney chord changes,” Wattie writes. “All that I could reflect on was grief and hope; death and life; cause and effect; shared experiences of being a human person.”
For a band whose 2024 album A Chaos of Flowers was described by KLOF’s Thomas Blake as “a visceral, moving, complex and gloriously heavy piece of work,” in grief or in hope promises to push their particular brand of massive minimalism into its most layered territory yet.
BIG|BRAVE tour Europe this spring, with North American dates to follow.
Pre-order BIG|BRAVE’s in grief or in hope: https://thrilljockey.com/products/in-grief-or-in-hope
BIG|BRAVE tour dates
May 24 – Utrecht, NL – EKKO
May 25 – Amsterdam, NL – OCCII
May 27 – Saint-Imier, CH – Toxoplasmose Festival
May 28 – Basel, CH – Kuppel
May 20 – Torino, IT – Jazz is Dead
May 30 – Piacenza, IT – Desert Fox Festival
May 31 – Ljubljana, SI – Channel Zero
Jun. 2 – Poznan, PL – Pawilon
Jun. 3 – Berlin, DE – Berghain