big|brave

Used to blasts of distortion, high volumes and feedback, BIG|BRAVE are one of the heaviest bands to appear in the last decade. The Montreal trio’s sound oscillates between crushing yards and moments of serenity. A Chaos of Flowers (2024), their eighth album, is also the most challenging in this respect, where the noise is as dense as the silence.

For this work, Robin Wattie – vocalist and guitarist – based herself on poems by writers who identify with the female gender and whose words resonate with the experiences of marginalized people. With an ethereal and restrained voice, Wattie whispers stories of isolation and resistance, examining chaos, confusion and alienation. “It is a feeling of identification and amazement how these writers from different backgrounds and times express intense and similar moments of individual experiences. We are alone and yet we are not,” says the singer in the press release accompanying the album. To help shape the poetry into dense and vulnerable songs, Mathieu Ball, on guitar, creates textures that fluctuate between the melancholic and the dissonant, while Tasy Hudson, on drums, elevates the percussion to a language that is sometimes calm and sometimes explosive.

A Chaos of Flowers is almost like a sister album to Nature Death (2023). Recorded in sequence, both were produced by Seth Manchester, a figure who has been at the forefront of heavier music, producing albums for Daughters, Lightning Bolt, Model/Actriz, Battles and Lingua Ignota. In 2025, BIG|BRAVE will return to Portugal to present this new work and what we can expect is a show with the decibels cranked way up.