mad enough to stay

“A love overgrown/ A quiet surrender/ Like roots among stones/ We carry on.”

After more than twenty years of arguing about it, I don’t have much time for artists or musicians who claim their work “isn’t political.” I remain very much invested, however, in conversations about how such work always is. The ways we conceive of how cultural production interfaces with or mediates political exchange is crucial to our understanding of what “politics” even is – an understanding which, I would argue, remains desperately underdeveloped. Of course, professing “good politics” doth not necessarily good art make, lord knows, but I always get most excited about work that’s animated by a commitment to making visible the social context and political economy of its production. It’s the way it’s done that makes it interesting.

Last March, longstanding Beirut trio Postcards released Ripe, their fifth album. It’s a gritty, urgent cri du coeur informed by the stark realities of trying to build a life in a place that seems trapped in a perpetual state of turmoil and crisis. It’s a “political” record, if anything is, but the band doesn’t put much stock in that kind of label. “If you are an artist living in a place that goes through so many things, you’re constantly having to deal with death and violence, and it’s going to seep into your art,” Julia Sabra, the band’s vocalist and guitarist, tells me. “If that makes it political, sure, yes, but I’m not trying to put out a statement, this is just the reality of our lives and this is what’s coming out.”

Ripe was something of a stylistic departure for Postcards, a move away from the dream pop-adjacent sound of their earlier work and towards darker and more confrontational sonic territory. The songs feel as though they’re barely able to contain the exasperated rage they so eloquently voice: “Destroy, rebuild, you know the drill,” the band chant on opener “I Stand Corrected,” while on lead single “Dust Bunnies,” Sabra surveys “The ruins of empires past/ The sad remains of broken glass/ The idiotic will to hope/ to soften every blow.” Recorded in Fall 2024, about a year into Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the album was composed over the preceding half-decade in the long shadow of civil war, the near-constant threat of Israeli bombardment and/or invasion, and Lebanon’s persistent political instability and social division. “We’ve been living really absurd times here since 2019,” says drummer Pascal Semerdjian, “Really absurd, like we still have so much new information thrown at us we’re not even able to think about the absurdity of what we’re going through. For a couple of years it wasn’t even a country.” Sabra describes writing material in the aftermath of the catastrophic 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut, feeling as though “we were in a post-apocalyptic moment, very close to death, and thinking about our place in time and history, and the rise and fall of civilizations.”

At the beginning of April, I speak over Zoom with Sabra and Semerdjian, both prolific artists active in many other projects within Beirut’s vibrant independent and experimental music scene. It had been a month since the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran and Lebanon, with Israel’s attacks moving further and further into Beirut. But it’s also Good Friday, and Sabra apologizes for the noise of church bells sounding out around her neighbourhood. “It’s really hard to describe for people who aren’t here, because it feels some days it’s normal, some days it’s not at all,” she says. “You can hear the war wherever you are, [even] if you’re [not] being directly affected by it. We’re in this weird limbo, and we never know what’s going to happen, and we’re taking it day by day and hour by hour.”

“The thing is,” she continues, “when you live in a country like Lebanon where it’s constantly in a state of emergency, or there’s always some shit happening, for better or for worse, life goes on. Life goes on in very different ways. Scattered ways.” Semerdjian, just arriving home from a rehearsal with another project, adds, “Another way to put it is that there’s a threshold that’s always changing. For example, on the first night of the war, we all heard the first bombs, it was terrifying, and everyone panicked. And then one week through the war, you have ten minutes of panic and then you get used to it. And then one month into the war, you have a whole night of bombing, and you can already sleep through it, you know? The threshold keeps changing and at the end you’re surprised of how normal things became to you.”

Ripe was released about a year before we speak, and I ask Sabra and Semerdjian to reflect on how the album has aged, and how its themes continue to resonate. “I think it’s just the tragedy of living in Lebanon,” Sabra tells me. “The songs become prophetic, also, but I think it’s sort of the same cycles over and over again. We wrote and rewrote [the album] multiple times, but some songs stayed because they just felt timeless in that way. I think it just stayed relevant.” A few days after our conversation, Israel carries out its ghoulish Operation Eternal Darkness – launching over 100 airstrikes in 10 minutes and killing over 300 people, in what The Guardian called “one of the worst mass-killings in Lebanon since the end of the country’s civil war in 1990” – and Sabra’s voice singing, “We’re always at half-mast/ In lands where nothing lasts/ In the belly of the past” continues to sound utterly vital.

But for all its incandescent anger, it’s the stubborn resilience of Ripe that feels most affecting. Throughout the album, there’s a resolute commitment to perseverance, to standing one’s ground and honouring the extant beauty still visible through the rubble, to staying despite it all. “It’s part of every person in Lebanon to decide whether they’re going to live in their own country or not,” says Semerdjian. “And not because, you know, ‘I’m bored of Beirut’ or something. It’s like ‘Do I want to secure a future and have a steady life, or do I want to go through this again and again?’ It’s a rite of passage, really, a lot people leave and come back, and a lot of people go and never come back. It’s a very heavy matter, and we keep asking ourselves this question.”

“For me, it feels like the album where I resolved my anger, and I’m accepting it,” Sabra says. “I’m not sure if people see it all the time but for me it’s like, no, I’m staying. I know I’m going through this, but it’s also a form of acceptance. Knowing that this is what I have to deal with, but what I get from it is this community and this meaning and this joy and this love.” Indeed, the members of Postcards are deeply rooted within an intensively productive and fearlessly creative community of independent musicians in Beirut – including boundary-pushing songwriter and urban scholar Mayssa Jallad, experimental oud player and electroacoustic composer Youmna Sabba, and thrilling psych-tinged post-rock ensemble Sanam, among countless others. “I think that’s the reason why we are still here,” Sabra says emphatically, “like literally, this community is what keeps everyone sane and reminds us of what the point of it all is. Literally. Completely.” Semerdjian adds, “It’s the only reason why we do this. No one is making any money off of it. You can’t have a career from this. We do it to feel like we have something to stand on: a community.”

Tunefork Studios, founded in 2006 by Fadi Tabbal and where many of these artists work and record, released a pair of compilation albums in late March, benefitting those displaced by the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. Postcards’ track “The Crow,” an outtake from Ripe, appears on the second edition, a highlight among a staggering array of incredible work. I highly recommend you check those out, and add Ripe to your rotation if it isn't there already.

Okay, now here's some songs. This one flits about a fair bit – first some folky stuff, then some indie rock, some more ambient/experimental stuff, and finally some crunchy guitar noise – but I think it all works together sufficiently well. As always, though, you can be the judge.

First it's Doon Kanda with "Fractal," the opener from Soem, which came out in February. Jesse Kanda is based in London, where, alongside creating woozy piano-centric ambient tunes like this one, he's known for striking, body horror-adjacent visual art which you'll recognize from the covers of albums from the likes of Arca and FKA Twigs. Next it's "Taamir (Bahriyyeh,)" a single just released by Beirut's Mayssa Jallad. Jallad is a scholar of urban history and built environment, her research forming the thematic bases for her experimental folk compositions. Her incredible 2023 album Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels focused on a site of urban warfare in Beirut during the early years of Lebanon's civil war, while this latest piece tells of the interconnected history of the Ain el Helwe refugee camp and the Taamir social housing project in Saida. It's incredible stuff.

After that it's Cinder Well, with "The Wise Man’s Song," released in February as the main theme from the impossibly charming BBC comedy-drama Small Prophets. As with much of her work as Cinder Well, here LA-based songwriter Amelia Baker fuses a warm and tactile folk idiom to a darker undercurrent of longing and haunted regret. Then it's Odanaki bassist and composer Mali Obomsawin's indie rock outfit Deerlady, conveying an uncanny calm amid the grainy turbulence of "Believer," followed up by Montreal's Ribbon Skirt with the crunchy drive of "LUCKY8," from their Pensacola EP, released in October.

Next it's Postcards – who, if you've read what's above, need no introduction – with "The Crow," an outtake from last year's Ripe just released in March as part of Tunefork's Land benefit compilation series. That's followed by LA multi-instrumentalist Aurielle Zeitler's Ghost Marrow project, with the appropriately ghostly "fed by the dirt," a mirage of synth clouds and vocal harmony from 2023's earth + death (which just saw re-release as an expanded set in April). That slides into "All Before You," from the original score for Palestine 36, the acclaimed dramatization of the great revolt of 1936-39, written by doomy post-metal ambient composer Ben Frost and performed by the The Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra. Then it's another highlight from the Land compilation series: the sombre yet psyche-inflected folk-rock stunner "Albi," from Alsilk & Bonne Chose.

Next, there's more from Beirut, with scene vet Charbel Haber's "I stutter when I speak of love and death," from his just-released LP, May a soft sun bless your sky while you wait for the inevitable. Here warbling, tinny guitar samples float between cavernous drone and what sounds like a chorus of angels, recalling some of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's early drone work. Then there's an excerpt of "OPPOSITIONAL GREENERY," from BLOOM AND RUIN, a collaborative project from experimental guitar giants Tashi Dorji and Efrim Manuel Menuck, whose LP Two Liberations releases in May. It's a truly glorious blast of sparkling noise, triumphant melodic flourishes emerging and then receding back into a chaos of distorted fuzz and drone. Finally, it's hometown heroes BIG|BRAVE, with the arresting title track from their forthcoming tenth (!) LP, in grief or in hope, which finds the band continuing to interrogate and deconstruct the song-form, this time eschewing percussion almost entirely in favour of a tsunami of layered sandpaper guitar noise and oscillating processed vocals.

• Mixcloud: mad enough to stay (apr 2026)

• MP3s: 26/05 - mad enough to stay.zip

NB: The zip file linked above contains the individual MP3s as well as a single hour-long track of the whole mix.

For the Montrealers, allow me to bring a few cool upcoming events to your attention:

May 25, 18h • Jeff Miller, Temporary Palaces book launch w/ Sean Michaels @ De Stiil Booksellers
Former Montrealer, Ghost Pine author, and all-round sweetheart Jeff Miller is launching his first proper novel hooray!

May 22, 20h • Death As It Shook You + Power Drop @ Casa Del Popolo
Montreal post-punk comrades DAISY and Power Drop play weird loud rock music at Casa, along with Pnoom and Chicago's Bursting. (tickets)

May 24, 15h • Molnar/Munden-Dixon/Foisy-Couture + Jesse Eckerlin + Robyn Gray @ Error 403
This is a special one: there'll be an improvised string trio comprised of all-stars Mark Molnar, Adrianne Munden-Dixon and Raphaël Foisy-Couture, outsider folk instrumentals from Jesse Eckerlin and freaky electric guitar improvisations from Robyn Gray (of Power Drop, Ky Band, Nennen, and a ton of other projects). Note the time: it's a Sunday afternoon matinee!

May 29, 20h30 • Habak + Jetsam + Endform @ Turbo Haus
Current champions of the melodic-crust underground, I've been looking forward to seeing Tijuana's Habak for a good while now, and they'll be perfectly complemented by dear comrades Jetsam and Endform. (tickets)

And okay, I'm just gonna say it: I've decided to dip a toe into trying to monetize this newsletter thingy. It'll always be free, and I'll always prefer individual engagement/feedback, mixtape theme requests, and/or shares with others over money. However, should you feel like helping offset some of the costs of running this by a little bit, I'd be much obliged. I'm thinking of ways to turn it into more of a proper zine over the course of this year, and I'll probably set up subscriptions at some point, but for the time being there's a "tip" function you can use to throw me some coins. No pressure, I promise, but that's right here if you're interested.

Okay, that's it! As always, thanks so much and fuck all states.

xo, graham