Hailing from Montreal, the trio Big|Brave has been expanding the possibilities of heavy music for well over a decade. Their latest album, available April 25 on vinyl and digital via Thrill Jockey, is the band’s most ambitious recording yet. Titled OST, its contents were conceived in studio using non-traditional instrumentation with the intention of soundtracking a film that had yet to be created. The music coheres into a strikingly unique progression retaining the intensity that’s associated with the work of Big|Brave.
Beginning with their debut EP “An Understanding Between People” in 2012 and across eight prior full-length records that followed, including Leaving None but Small Birds, a collaboration with labelmates The Body released in 2021, Big|Brave has consistently pushed the boundaries of a sound that can be aptly described as post-doom metal.
On early records such as 2015’s Au De La and 2017’s Ardor, the band honed a sound that combined doom-laden bombast with rhythmic thud occasionally reminiscent of later period Swans; the emotional wallop of Robin Wattie’s voice enhanced the similarity to Swans and simultaneously added an air of distinctiveness.
Wattie and Matthieu Ball founded Big|Brave alongside drummer Louis-Alexandre Beauregard; Wattie and Ball both played guitar. Beauregard departed the group after Ardor, and for 2019’s A Gaze Among Them, Loel Campbell played drums. In 2020, Tasy Hudson took over the drumming duties and has remained in that position since, playing on 2021’s Vital and Leaving None but Small Birds, 2023’s Nature Morte, and 2024’s A Chaos of Flowers.
Big|Brave’s sound was a solid fit for Southern Lord, the label that released Au Del La through Vital. With Leaving None but Small Birds, the band commenced a relationship with Thrill Jockey that’s continued through the release of OST. Across this span, there have been subtle progressions in the music, with an attention to meditative atmospheres particularly impressive as the focus on heaviness adjusted.
A Chaos of Flowers brought an increase in ambition, as much of the record’s lyrics are based on poems by female poets including Emily Dickinson, Yosano Akiko, Esther Popel, and E. Pauline Johnson. If less heavy in the band’s established sense, there was no loss of intensity in A Chaos of Flowers’ overall thrust. With this current record, Big|Brave take a major leap in terms of execution, creating in studio with a shift away from the instruments, specifically guitar and drums, that had previously defined their sound.
Guitar is still present on OST, but in a far reduced capacity in favor of prepared speaker, electronics, tape loops, piano, Wurlitzer, Moog grandmother, vibraphone, and a creation by Ball made from discarded piano strings called The Instrument. Producer Seth Manchester contributes as a player and there is flute in the record’s final piece by Melissa Guion.
OST’s pieces, all titled “innominate” in eight movements, are successful in building a soundtrack-like atmosphere, though the images envisioned as it plays are appealingly non-traditional, and the record is conceptually unstrained as a whole. Heaviness isn’t absent but internalized. After the music’s completion, Big|Brave enlisted prior collaborator Stacy Lee to create a visual score to the eight movements. The intention is to take it all out on the road for some shows. Until then OST is a robust experience wholly on its own.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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