Moody, luminous and quietly feral, Snakeskin’s music floats voluptuous vocals over a bed of industrial beats, ambient drone and shapeshifting electronics.
Over a decade of collaboration, producer Fadi Tabbal and singer-songwriter Julia Sabra have sculpted a sound that is both melancholic and radiant: a haunting palette of reflection, collapse and resistance that keeps developing in their new album We live in sand, out today as a co-release between Ruptured and Beacon Sound.
Since their inception, the Lebanese duo’s music has served as a kind of real-time archive of their country's turmoil. The band’s 2022 self-titled debut was shaped by the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion. They Kept Our Photographs (2024) was written in the early months of the war on Gaza. But on We Live In Sand, the violence is no longer at a distance. It is here, now. The war has reached their doorstep.
On the opener Ready, Fadi Tabbal’s production cracks and rumbles like tectonic plates, while Sabra sings through autotune — ethereal, almost post-human. Snakeskin has always thrived in extremes, but here the contrast is sharpened to a knife’s edge. By the time closer In the Pines arrives, there is no resolution. Only smoke, ruin, and the sound of crickets. “I thought I was fine” Sabra sings — the kind of line that lands hardest when everything has already been lost.
Snakeskin perform at Le Guess Who? 2025 on Saturday 8 November. Also performing at the festival are a.o. Tomo Katsurada, Yara Asmar, Sawt El Doumouh صوت الدموع, and many more.
