PRE-ORDER: Sour Widows "Sigil" Cassette

Not long ago, Maia Sinaiko had a nightmare that morphed into an epiphany. While they slept, Sinaiko imagined that the world was ending, that the Earth itself was about to be swallowed by a black hole. From their perch in an old bedroom in a long-ago apartment, Sinaiko saw that physics itself was rupturing—water ran in reverse, doors locked and unlocked without a touch, traffic lights hung upside down. All traces of human civilization would soon be obliterated, our collective efforts lost forever; no one would ever know, Sinaiko realized in their nocturnal terror, about the films their sister had made. Sinaiko cried to their father, who responded to this looming end-of-everything scenario with an unexpected bit of sanguine wisdom: “But it could be amazing.”

This is the premise of the opening title track of Sigil, the second album by Sour Widows, the Bay Area band Sinaiko started nearly a decade ago now with fellow songwriter, singer, and guitarist Susanna Thomson. Actually, that feeling of hope slithering from dark corners permeates most every track of Sigil, an album named for a dream that Thomson had about making a record called “Sigil” and that navigates the wasteland of human cruelty and loss only to emerge with defiant and hard-won hope. Awful things happen during Sigil. A genocide leaves bodies rotting in the sun. Lovers subjugate their counterparts with empty promises, emotional cruelty, and physical dominance. Parents are lost, leaving behind chasms that only seem to grow. But these conflicts and crises alternately produce righteous rage, welcome solidarity, and revelatory freedom. Sigil sounds like a musical breakthrough for Sour Widows, and its songs about persevering and growing feel like personal breakthroughs, too. An end is always nearby here. What comes after can always be amazing.

Crafted with acclaimed producer and Jay Som mastermind Melina Duterte in downtown Los Angeles, the album’s eleven songs curve in unexpected directions and are the most magnetic Sour Widows have written yet. There is a newfound immediacy to the album as if Sour Widows have urgent findings to share, and throughout Sigil, ostensible disaster ushers in a new start.