‘Did you find what you left for? Did your fear start shutting doors? Did your dream feel real in the shadows? In the shadow, hold fast, faint light’ (Keening)

Toronto’s Respire return with their fourth album, Hiraeth, an ambitious release in terms of both its execution and its deeply layered lyrical exploration of what it means to be an immigrant.  Musically, the band continue to hone a base sound grounded in a blend of pared back black metal and screamo.  This forms the bedrock for the band’s more expansive orchestral and post-metal elements, which inspire a perpetual tension between haunting melancholy and defiant optimism.

The vocals alternate, and are also frequently layered, between harrowing blackened screams and buoyantly hopeful passages of cleanly sung emotive punk.  A similar push-pull dynamic is evident in the band’s orchestral instrumentation, sorrowful strings are deeply braided with brightly uplifting brass, at times in seeming competition, at others entwined with singular purpose.  Honing these often-disparate ingredients, which could be reasonably said to span from Dawn Ray’d to The Hotelier by way of Youthmovies, into a cohesive whole is no mean feat, but it is one that Respire pull off with relish.  Not least, perhaps, on my personal highlights The Match, Consumed, The Sun Sets Without Us, and We Grow Like Trees In Rooms Of Borrowed Light.

This vibrantly realised tension is in many respects a sonic embodiment of the very concept of the album’s title.  Hiraeth is a Welsh language term, with few direct equivalents in other languages, that speaks to the many emotional dimensions arising from a loss of homeland and tradition.  It is concurrently imbued with both a sense of grief for something lost and a yearning to realise something better, the former being the key to unlocking the latter.

The album also brings the concept vividly to life through its nuanced lyrical exploration of (im)migration.  Both its causes and consequences are teased out primarily through the lens of two countries.  Firstly, Canada’s relationship with the wider British Empire (First Snow and We Grow Like Trees In Rooms Of Borrowed Light) and its own Indigenous population (Voiceless; Nameless) and, secondly, the experiences of Albania as an Italian colony, communist state, and then the savage shock of the unfettered capitalism that ensued following the collapse of the Soviet Union (The Match, Consumed).

This approach allows the band to explore how people are forced to emigrate, often as a consequence of colonial legacies (Home Of Ash and Farewell [In Standard]), and the pain and courage entailed in leaving your home (Keening).  Even more powerfully, it speaks to how readily our political class will seek to manipulate blame for the consequences of their decisions to fall on those already most marginalised, a narrative in which we ourselves are too often silently complicit (Distant Light Of Belonging, The Sun Sets Without Us, and Do The Birds Still Sing?).

Hiraeth is an album defined by its musical invention but also, more importantly, by a deep-seated humanity that radiates from its very core.

This is the Persistent Vision pressing.