Big | Brave announce new album ‘Vital’

February 27, 2021 James Weaver

BIG | BRAVE have announced a new album!

Titled Vital, the upcoming album from the Montreal-based band is the follow-up to 2019’s A Gaze Among Them and is scheduled to be released in April this year, via Southern Lord.

Lyrically, the new album intends to explore the weight of race and gender, endurance and navigating other people’s behaviours, observation and protest. Speaking about the upcoming album, the band says, “this album involves what it means navigating the outside world in a racialised body and what it does to the psyche as a whole while exploring individual worth within this reality.”

For this record, BIG | BRAVE once again made the journey down to Rhode Island to record with Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets. They add, “we fully trust his instinct as an engineer and his creative output, getting to experiment with textures, concepts, layers, and with pretty much every single recorded sound, the process of making records with Seth is an absolute journey in sonic exploration.”

Alongside the announcement of the new album, the band have released a new music video for the first song to be lifted from the upcoming album; Half Breed. The new music video is a single shot of a single performative action that can be read as the representation of the damage an external force can have on someone or something without ever having to bear any responsibility and consequence. Speaking about the music video, the band says, “the action of shovelling dirt onto the person, also acts a way to discredit, shame and discriminate the individual. With the victim (on screen), being painfully covered with dirt by the perpetrator (off screen), all we have to witness is the damage done and left behind. We are aware of what is happening, what has happened, but the source is kept anonymous and can easily be missed and overlooked.”

Watch the official music video for Half Breed here: