Spain are a Kingston, New York trio playing screamo and post-hardcore, and all five songs on “Bathyal” were finished before they had played a single show. They recorded them after roughly nine months together. A year of live sets later, the arrangements remain close to those recordings, although Spain now play them slower and with an emotional intensity they say was hard to reach in practice.
By May 2026, they had been writing together for close to two years and playing shows for about a year. Lynn Tuimil plays bass, Sofia Peeters drums and Lorraine Salisbury guitar and vocals. “Bathyal” runs for 13 minutes and 46 seconds across “Plateau”, “Stone Staircase”, “Psychic”, “Shell” and “Demimonde”, and it doesn’t feel too short at all.
Unhinged, needling, vicious screamo that somehow leaves a surprising amount of room for slower passages, mostly so it can build something properly horrible before drilling back into your skull like that scene in the legendary Pi movie. Then it loosens its grip for a second, gives you some air, and goes straight back into the spasms and all that raw nerve damage that fierce 90s and 00s screamo was built on.
Now I really want to hear what these guys can do with better production and a longer release, because getting through this EP already feels like a minor trepanation.
The lyrics are short, repetitive and physical. “Plateau” keeps returning to pinyon pine, a place where there is “not enough to survive”. “Stone Staircase” moves through questions about ownership of the body before ending at the bottom of the staircase. “Psychic” strips its words down even further, repeating “paper tigers burn” and “you’re nothing”. “Shell” brings in ice moving through the spine, apathy, a knife turned inward, pain and the repeated pairing of moth and flame. “Demimonde” opens with blood and pushes through girls in the gutter, copper barbed wire, glass and broken bones. The language works in brief repeated images, with very little space wasted on explanation.
Spain started from a much busier musical place. Lynn and Lorraine had just come back from New Friends in Toronto (see our massive feature here) feeling charged up, and they were frustrated by what they saw as a lack of edge in a lot of the music around them at home. Their starting rule was simple: “let’s just be as fucked up as possible”.
The first two songs were written on bass and guitar before Sofia joined. With no drums in the room, Lynn and Lorraine kept filling the available space with more sections.
“We started the first two songs writing just with bass and guitar, and without drums we achieved that but it also kind of sounded like demented circus music,” Lorraine said. “We were really excited and maybe a little too enthusiastic about cramming as many parts as possible into one song.”
Sofia’s arrival changed what they could actually play as a trio. Bass and guitar no longer had to cover every gap. Spain cut parts, left more space and developed a clearer centre for each song. They had a direction from the beginning, but the three of them still had plenty to work out once the songs had to survive a full band playing them in the same room.
“Psychic” changed the most. Its first version came from the same impulse to keep adding ideas. Once Spain had finished their first five songs and understood each other better as musicians, they went back to it.
“We wanted to lean into a more dynamic style instead of this crowded/claustrophobic kind of thing that we had gone for initially and the song ended up a lot better for it.”
Plenty of other songs disappeared completely. Spain have started songs and abandoned them early, but they have also thrown away pieces that were almost finished because nobody believed in them enough to keep going.
“We’ve even had songs that are pretty much complete but they just don’t feel convincing and we end up tossing them, and I think the songs we do keep are better for having gone through that full writing process and realizing it’s just not right.”
Those five survivors became the whole of “Bathyal“. They were the first five songs Spain finished together, all written during the period when the band were still figuring out how the three personalities worked in one room. Practices during that first year regularly continued until 1 or 2 in the morning, and a lot of that time went into talking.
Lorraine said it can be difficult to find musicians you feel completely in sync with, and all three were excited simply to be there together. With no live audience feeding anything back to them yet, the songs grew closely around one another. Spain came to hear them as five parts of the same piece.
“These songs are what made us a band, and I think you can really feel that.”
The first shows exposed a practical problem straight away. Spain were playing too fast. They were pushing through the songs and losing the sense of being fully inside each section.
“The first thing that we realized was that we needed to slow way down, and we were pushing through the material on stage instead of being locked into the moment.”
The bigger change came from playing those songs in front of other people. Spain say the emotional centre only really appeared through the exchange between the three of them, the room and the audience. A rehearsal could get the parts right. A show could take the same arrangement somewhere they rarely reached alone.
“The live show is this kind of emergent experience where all of these factors are coming together and allowing us to push it as far as it can go. That added energy lets us really lean into the drama, and everything is amplified. The highs are higher, the lows are lower, the quiet parts are quieter etc. Very rarely are we getting to the place in practice where we can play from the deepest parts of ourselves.”
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“Bathyal” had already been recorded by the time those lessons started accumulating. The sessions took place roughly a year before Spain sent these answers, when the three had been playing together for about nine months. Recorded at Cassandra Studios, the release was mixed and mastered by Maya Chun. Sofia made the album art.
The arrangements themselves have stayed fairly stable. Spain say the larger difference now comes from having another year together, both individually as musicians and collectively as a band.
“At this point it feels like we play all of the songs differently than we did on the record. The recording sessions were a year ago and since then we’ve all come so far individually and together as a band. We had all been playing together for about 9 months at the time of recording and now we are just so much more mature as a band.”
“In a technical sense they’re not much different but from an emotional standpoint we’ve all changed and grown so much that it’s a different thing entirely.”
A demo of “Plateau” had appeared back in April 2025. “Bathyal” followed on May 19, 2026. The release is available digitally, on a purple cassette limited to 22 copies and on CD in a jewel case with photos by Sofia. Lorraine also hand-prints Spain shirts to order in an edition of 50.
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By September, Spain said the “Bathyal” songs themselves had not changed much structurally. The set around them had. The trio wrote a lot of new stuff during summer 2026 and began bringing those songs into their shows, so the tour starting this week already carries a version of Spain that reaches past the record released in May.
The run opens at home in Kingston on September 12. @deep_rift_dweller recently reposted the tour poster with a prediction that come September “everyone will be talking about spain”, followed by a direct push to get to the Kingston show.
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September 12, Kingston, NY, Tubby’s
September 13, Rochester, NY, Flying Squirrel
September 14, Columbus, OH, Dirty Dungarees
September 15, Kalamazoo, MI, The Potato Sack
September 16, Chicago, IL, Burlington Bar
September 18, Minneapolis, MN, Seward Cafe
September 19, Milwaukee, WI, MIKE Ultra
