Respire are a difficult band to categorize. While certain parts are somewhat easy to parse out — they're a diverse collective that fuses black metal, skramz, post-rock and orchestral strings into a brutal, soaring conglomeration — there's still an air of indefinability, of contrast. On stage and in person, they're funny, approachable and self-deprecating, yet the music blooming from that same stage is extremely complex, focused and serious, filled with big sounds, big ideas and even bigger emotions.
Rooted in the community-building practices of DIY, the band — Egin Kongoli (vocals, guitar, synthesizer, piano), Rohan Lilauwala (vocals, guitar), Darren Scarfo (vocals, guitar), Travis Dupuis (vocals, drums), Ben Oliver (bass guitar), Eslin McKay (vocals, violin, viola) and Emmett O'Reilly (vocals, trumpet) — has been a powerful force in the Toronto music scene for a decade, finding fans across genre and geographic boundaries, the latter of which has become part of the band's own story: since the release of their last album, 2020's Black Line, Respire have had to contend with a newfound distance, its members split between Toronto and Austin, Texas. This physical separation meant that recording an album would come with some very new, very unique challenges, and over a four-year period, the band crafted their latest outing through demos and sheet music, even reuniting at a farmhouse to write and compose the songs that would make up the haunting, sprawling Hiraeth.
According to the band, Hiraeth "is a manifesto of the immigrant experience; a call for all of us to embrace our shared humanity, awaken to the fragility of our existence, and confront the crises we face collectively before it's too late." Over a six-month period, the band worked with recording engineer Sean Pearson, mixing and mastering engineer Jack Shirley, and numerous collaborators (Tokyo Speirs, Andrew Moljgun and A Paradise), all while producing the album themselves. The result is an intimate yet grandiose work filled with serenity and noise, love and pain, water and fire, distance and meaning. It is complicated, introspective and loud, much like the immigrant experience (one that this writer is all too familiar with).
Opener "Keening" is a raw and very vulnerable dissection of the band, its members and the choices they've (we've?) made. For a moment in the middle, there is respite, McKay's plaintive strings shining calm and alone before O'Reilly's trumpet enters with Dupuis's light cymbal taps — the calm before the storm. When Kongoli, Lilauwala and Scarfo's dueling, screeching guitars and vocals enter, balanced by Oliver's powerful basslines, the band's inimitable chemistry is on full display; vibrant, harrowing and necessary.
"The Match, Consumed," one of their most brutal compositions to date, possibly takes its title from a poem by Hannah Senesh, a World War II resistance fighter and "modern-day Joan of Arc." Filled with relentless drumming and riffing and punctuated by bottomless growls that shake to the core, the track is fast, fierce and uncompromising, a diatribe against complacency and a call to action, opposition and self-reflection.
Beneath the screams, first single "Distant Light of Belonging" shows some decidedly mid-western emo influences, its immediate yet haunting melodies giving way to a terrifying breakdown, where brutal vocal roars are juxtaposed by the brass and strings. During its triumphant outro, the band crashes and sways, the noise ending abruptly as the drifting electronic buzz bleeds into the soft piano of "First Snow."
Respire's music has always been political, attacking society's ills with poetry and noise. Yet Hiraeth feels blunter, more direct. It's a reckoning from a band bursting with anger and desperation, the album acting as a furious witness to a world where violence, degradation and division are not only accepted, but applauded. "Home of Ash," the album's emotional centrepiece, embodies this approach, confronting generational trauma, familial expectations and the settler mentality in equal, pointed measure. They scream, "What right do we have / To shut our doors / To build these walls / To call this home / Under the earth / Under this house."
And this is what sets Respire's music and politics apart from other heavy bands: throughout the album—including standouts "We Grow Like Trees in Rooms of Borrowed Light" and "Do the Birds Still Sing?"—they confront both the listener and themselves in equal measure: whenever they say "you," it's unmistakably also directed at the band. Everyone is complacent and no one is absolved; the band isn't doing any better than you are, so let's all do better, okay? Okay!
The album's final song, "Farewell (In Standard)," is a gentle, strings-and-brass-filled affair, with twinkling glockenspiel and hushed guitars backing lyrics filled with distance and hope, a love letter to resistance, friendship and music itself: "I want to get out from / Under this weight / To love even when we / Don't love ourselves / To love yourself when / you don't love the world."
The songs on Hiraeth deal with mental health, gender, (im)migration, colonialism, trauma, memory and the band's own output and legacy, and at almost fifty minutes long, this is neither a comfortable nor easy listen. And yet, it's nonetheless comforting, a barbed blanket rooted in defiance and love, reminding you to never give up hope. Respire's music celebrates those who fight, those who resist and liberate, those who aren't afraid of sacrifice, and that's a beautiful, encouraging sentiment. On "Keening," the first song on the record, they sing, "Still, we keep on screaming / Writing songs to no one / Trying to find the words / Trying to find the way / To thrash against / To thrash again."
And they have. And they will. For all our sakes, let's hope they never stop.
