Bambara – Birthmarks
Bambara‘s world is a dangerous place. It’s strewn with jagged edges and bloodstained fabrics, populated by ill-fated outlaws and psychosexual arsonists. The bleak storytelling of vocalist Reid Bateh is steeped in violent Western imagery and noir tones, around which the group wrapped appropriately snarling punk-blues riffs informed by the likes of The Birthday Party and The Gun Club on their prior albums such as 2018’s Shadow On Everything and 2020’s Stray. Yet with a step closer to the light on Love on My Mind, their stellar EP from 2020, the group recalibrated their approach, paring back their most abrasive tendencies in favor of a maximalist gothic pop wrapped in the radiant glow of synthesizers.
That gorgeously eerie halo vibrates over every song on Birthmarks, the band’s first new full-length album in five years and the first they’ve recorded with producer Graham Sutton, formerly of Bark Psychosis. Casting a wider sonic net—drawing heavily from influences ranging from Cocteau Twins to Portishead—as they maintain their focus on a particularly nightmarish slice of Americana, Bambara render narratives of murder and obsession through a beautifully surreal filter. It’s their prettiest shade of grotesque yet, like a Middle American post-punk giallo.
There’s little to no trace of the group’s signature blood-and-rust riffs on the immaculate gothic opener “Hiss,” an atmospheric stunner that slowly builds tension through spectral synthesizers. There’s a sense of menace here that’s unmistakable, though—every Bambara song, no matter how gentle or pretty, has it, and “Hiss” is no different, particularly when tendrils of noisy guitar begin to wrap around its otherwise graceful facade. But Bambara allow an even broader array of hues into their palette from there, juxtaposing icy loops of harp against trip-hop beats and guest vocals from Midwife’s Madeline Johnston on “Face of Love,” and inviting a saxophone solo into an uncanny artificial angel’s choir on “Because You Asked.”
These atmospheric flourishes and more elegant arrangements only enhance the level of terror in Bateh’s lyrical scenes, lending them a supernatural presence rather than a visceral one. It’s hard to say which is more harrowing, the icepick piano plinks of “Holy Bones” or the murderer demanding his turn at the electric chair in the barnburning “Letters From Sing Sing”: “If killing’s what I did, killed’s what I should get.” The similarly thorny and intense “Pray to Me” is equal parts Flannery O’Connor and David Lynch, wherein a one-eyed man stabs the companion of the object of his affection (“Don’t you be scared, I just want the halo in your hair“) at a country karaoke night. Just a little bit later, amid the dense and woozy atmosphere “Dive Shrine,” Bateh brings us back to the sadness of that morbid scene, “a memorial site that for a sprouting love whose bud was cut.”
Birthmarks strips away some of the grit and grain, but in doing so, the added sheen captures a brilliant glint in each drop of blood and a mesmerizing emptiness behind the psychopath’s eyes. The nightmarish and the dreamlike are perpetually blurred throughout, bliss always on the brink of becoming tragedy. It’s a compelling and cruel trick that Bambara pull off here, delivering their most beautiful songs only to see twist of the knife in greater clarity.
Label: Wharf Cat/Bella Union
Year: 2025
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Bambara : Birthmarks
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