201: Snakeskin - October Sun
If you followed our end-of-year coverage in 2024, you might have found your way to Julia Sabra's striking Natural History Museum LP. Raw and heartbreaking, it was Sabra's first solo release away from her work as Snakeskin; a marked departure from the electronic-pop she makes alongside fellow Lebanese musician Fadi Tabbal.
A year on from Snakeskin's second album, They Kept Our Photographs, Sabra and Tabbal return again this Autumn with another full-length effort, in the form of We live in sand. The pair have released a beautiful taster from it this week. Gently skewed and captivating, 'October Sun' is a heavy wash of manipulated voices and subtle keys; a heart-wrenching glimpse into life lived in the shadow of Israel's continued violence.
"In October 2024, a few weeks into Israel's expanded war on Lebanon, Fadi and I found ourselves on a plane to Switzerland, for a tour and residency," Julia detailed on Instagram . "It was surreal to leave home during this time, to try and write music in what felt like an alternate reality. There was a train track right by my room at Prozess, and the first time the train passed early in the morning, the ground shook and I woke up in a sweat, thinking it was an Israeli bomb. We Live In Sand is yet another attempt to process our lives - war, fear, death, grief."
The song is accompanied by an equally compelling video, which feels like the way in which this song should be found and consumed. You can find the details of the video here, and watch it below.
With images shot over the course of several years across Lebanon, Mohamad Abdouni’s music video for Snakeskin transforms a personal photographic archive into a haunting, animated loop. The images of desolate streets and quiet landscapes unfold in an endless Groundhog Day cycle that is occasionally disrupted by change.
The work distills the strange elasticity of time during war, with days blurring into each other, and the weight of sameness punctuated only by subtle, disquieting changes. Abdouni’s slow, hypnotic dissolves become a visual echo of life under siege, where the smallest alterations can feel seismic, and survival is measured in the quiet persistence of repetition.
Watch the October Sun video on GFP here
We Live In Sand is released in October, pre-order via Bandcamp
