{"id":643513,"date":"2026-10-28T06:04:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T06:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/643513\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T06:04:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T06:04:08","slug":"sour-widows-sigil-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/643513\/","title":{"rendered":"Sour Widows: Sigil Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apocalypse takes many forms on Sigil, the second record from Sour Widows<\/a>. Its songs are littered with black holes, disasters, nuclear bombs; there are guttural screams and onslaughts of distorted guitar. This brutality isn\u2019t the Bay Area band\u2019s only mode, but hardly a song passes on Sigil without destruction, or at least the looming threat of it.<\/p>\n

Often, these crises follow the logic of dreams, where angels can crawl in through your ceiling, or a door can let in \u201call the filth from the world.\u201d The album was conceived from a series of dreams, too: It takes its title from one that singer and guitarist Susanna Thomson had about making a record named Sigil, and the premise of its title track comes from a dream her bandmate, Maia Sinaiko, had about the end of the world.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

It feels fitting that the record\u2019s name and title track represent a kind of symbolic merging of Thomson and Sinaiko\u2019s subconscious minds. The two artists met as teens and started the group together about a decade ago; on their early EPs and first record<\/a>, their intense intimacy as friends formed the backbone of their music, manifesting in winding, interwoven guitar lines and shared singing and songwriting duties. Those releases featured slowcore-indebted indie rock, often in six- or eight-minute songs that built to towering peaks. Their second record is somewhat sleeker\u2014no song surpasses five minutes\u2014but packs considerable emotion into these tighter forms.<\/p>\n

Sour Widows made Sigil with producer Melina Duterte of Jay Som<\/a>, and together, they built a dense, lush backdrop for the songs\u2019 questions of meaning and vulnerability. Strings, organ, and Mellotron float in the background of several tracks; on \u201cLucky Star\u201d and \u201cStill Warm,\u201d ghostly guitar effects briefly fill the frame. There\u2019s an increased sense of drive on these songs, which sometimes comes from swifter tempos and sometimes from the thoughtful additions of the band\u2019s rhythm section: drummer Max Edelman, who has played alongside Sinaiko and Thomson for years, and bassist Bella King. The band\u2019s knack for emotional catharsis persists: \u201cSigil\u201d and \u201cLucky Star\u201d climax with howled vocals over keening violin and cello; \u201cHer Garden,\u201d which also includes the album\u2019s hookiest chorus, builds up to a swaggering guitar solo; the thunderous end of \u201cWhite Horse\u201d veers toward grunge and sounds like an exorcism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Apocalypse takes many forms on Sigil, the second record from Sour Widows. Its songs are littered with black…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":643514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[4958,156,157,111,139,69,1251],"class_list":["post-643513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=643513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/643514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=643513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=643513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=643513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}