Respire - Hiraeth

Earlier this year, I put up half of Respire in my apartment for three days. I bought this album from them at a show we both played at Pet Shop in Jersey City. As much as Ben, Egin, and Emmett were cool dudes who were polite about the ongoing Canadian-Uesican tensions, I had formed my opinion about Respire's 2024 effort Hiraeth before they ever entered the country.

I've described Respire to friends as "Broken Social Screamo". There are several great screamo bands that use orchestral instruments, but Respire makes orchestral instruments the foundation of their sound. Their live act has a trumpet and a violin (and also three guitarists, two of whom trade screams), and their record layers synth pads, horns, and strings atop tremolo guitars to devastating effect. Previous albums Denouement and Black Line show off their post-hardcore foundations. Hiraeth is full-throated chamber music maximalism with blast beats and yelping over billowing string harmonies.

You will know by the first ten seconds of the first song if you're going to like this album or not. "Keening" starts with an accordion-flavored waltz with Rohan Lilauwala screaming about his parents' sacrifices and alienation from the past. There are more traditionally orchestrated songs, like blackened "The Match, Consumed" and doomy "Do the Birds Still Sing?", but even those feature saxophones and glockenspiel on their back halves.

The lyrical throughline of this album is the titular emotion, a uniquely Welsh word that roughly translates to deep homesickness. Rohan was born in Mumbai, and has lived in Japan, Canada, and the USA. Egin was born in Albania and lives in Toronto. Themes of identity, culpability, and the weight of the past ground this record in immigrant pain and hope. For example, the last song of the A-side "Home of Ash" raises the question of whether as immigrants, they and their parents bear the same responsibility for the suffering of Canada's First Nations peoples and more recent arrivals as the Anglo-French do. "Complacent, this settler morality/How did we get/Blinded by division, nation and God/Pliant idolater, lost but can be found/You wanted to believe in a better life for us/Dependent on the promise, we’re tied to the blame." It doesn't hurt that this deep introspection is paired with an ecstatic post-rock melody and propulsive post-hardcore drums.

The album cover tells you exactly what you're in for. A picture frame is adorned with faded red and white carnations: a symbol of love. The frame sits around a window, looking onto a grey ocean. Nautical motifs show up all over the album's lyrics. The CD comes with a little obi strip, and the back packaging is in Japanese. I hate trying to keep track of my obi strips, but I still think they're neat.

The "hit" is probably "Distant Light of Belonging", which would fit beautifully over any overly-sincere foreign RPG cutscene. It also serves as a mission statement for the album. Lead guitar, violin, and trumpet trade phrases in a whirl of harmonies and counterpoint behind the frantic screamers, all building to a cathartic breakdown rivaling some of Arcade Fire's. This album has been in pretty regular rotation for the past few months, verging on overplayed, but I can definitely see myself coming back to this again.

Hiraeth by Respire is a good album, and I like it.