Life and love are worth the inevitability of loss. Loneliness and regret make a lousy insurance policy against not truly living. Let It Hiss turns that reality into sound: the ache, the mending, and the static between two brothers who had to lose their rhythm to find it again.
After years of near silence and frayed connection, The Barr Brothers didn’t return with polish or pretense. They came back with truth. You can hear it in the way the record trembles, heals, and occasionally howls. Addiction, distance, and reluctant forgiveness linger beneath every track. This isn’t about recovery as victory; it’s about the messy work of staying human.
The title track lays this out like indie gospel: “Northern stars and battle scars, Don’t let anyone divert you, Just because you don’t feel the pain, Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt you.”
It’s both warning and invitation, a reminder that numbness is just another kind of wound. Brad Barr sings with a voice free and clear of denial, while Andrew’s percussion keeps time like an old heartbeat relearning its place.
The hiss isn’t just a sound tracked in the recording; it’s a state of being. It’s what lingers after silence, proof that something still breathes beneath the static. It hums like a pulse in the wires, imperfect but vital. Every artist must decide what to polish and what to preserve, and Let It Hiss chooses preservation.
The Barr Brothers understand that clarity doesn’t always come clean. Sometimes the truth is stubborn and unresolved. They let it stay. They let it breathe. The hiss becomes a kind of oxygen, an audible reminder that beauty lives inside the distortion and that survival, like music, is never spotless.
Run Right Into It and English Harbour broaden the scope of what is possible. Run Right Into It pulses with momentum and clarity. It’s a daring sprint through memory’s burning house.
English Harbour drifts like fog rolling off cold water, a call across an invisible distance. Both are bound by the same unspoken truth: connection costs, but it’s worth the price.
When Upsetter closes out the album, it’s a rupture and a release. It breaks from the confines of what The Barr Brothers are known for and jolts into something raw and uncontainable. There’s a surf-punk edge, all nervous energy and grit, like Jack White wrestled Tom Waits’ junkyard ghosts during his Swordfishtrombones era.
It’s cathartic clang, a manic exorcism with melody bleeding through. The honesty remains intact, but the restraint is gone. It’s the sound of motion after stasis, the equivalent of kicking down the door just to see daylight again.
Let It Hiss is not a return to form; it’s high-stakes bargaining with it. The Barr Brothers are no longer chasing beauty, they’re challenging it. And in doing so, they’ve built something braver than harmony: truth with sharp edges.
Love, even when it falters, is still worth the fall. Loneliness, for all its false safety, offers no shelter at all. Let It Hiss is redemption rendered in emotional distortion—a record about letting the light in, even when it burns. The hiss isn’t interference anymore; it’s proof of life.
Keytracks: Upsetter, Let It Hiss, Run Right Into It
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