Snakeskin’s third album is a raw, urgent dream pop document of love, grief, and survival in wartime Lebanon, fusing industrial beats, ambient dirges, and haunting vocals. 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.
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. RIYL: Broadcast, Grouper, Laetitia Sadler, Julia Holter, Carla Del Forno, Astrid Sonne, Jenny Hval, Ana Roxanne, Acopia, Juana Molina, Panda Bear
