Orchestral post-black metal / post-hardcore / screamo outfit RESPIRE are back with their third full-lenght record called ‘Black Line‘, out 4th December on Church Road Records. The band just premiered their new music video for the song “To Our Dead Friends” and you can watch it above.
Canadian DIY collective Respire have been crafting cinematic, genre-defying soundscapes since forming in the bitter winter of 2013, when they spent evenings and weekends in a frigid west-end Toronto basement. Blending lush, emotive orchestration with the fervor and aggression of blackened hardcore, Respire aim to create hopeful music for troubling times.
With an army of collaborators in tow, the six-piece have released two critically-acclaimed LPs (Gravity and Grace, 2016, and Dénouement, 2018), and toured Europe (2017, 2018) and Mexico (2019). They are back in 2020 at their most ambitious and incendiary – weaving an anti-fascist narrative of redemption against the backdrop of impending global climate catastrophe.
Written over two years and produced over six months, Black Line finds Respire turning away from the sickness of the self and onto the sickness ailing the world. Yet despite its towering inferno of anguish, Black Line is a call to arms – to burn away the ugliness that threatens to divide and destroy us, to reclaim agency in a world spiraling out of control, to find beauty in destruction and hope in rebirth.
GO HERE to watch their previous video for the song Cicatrice.
Lyrics:
if you’re alone and still screaming
is it fear that finds you under tranquil tides
is it bliss that binds you to watching yourselffall apart
cursed to repeat, as the currents drag us
lights out, lights out (for all our dreams of painlessness)
strung out, strung out (we lose ourselves in our despair)
I’m drowning, so lost to the high
so lost to the lows I’m
not found at allI know we’re trying
I know, the ending comes too fast and all at once
I know, we lost this fight so many times beforealone (they want us)
alone (to fall)
alone (we climb out into the night)together (they hear us)
together (they fall)
together (we climb out into the light)to all our dead friends lost to stars you shined so bright
they couldn’t see you yet they’re so blinded by the fight
the world’s a desperate place we’re not built for all the light
you dreamt life could shine softly at night…
