'They Kept Our Photographs' covers a lot of ground. Lyrically, singer-songwriter Julia Sabra delivers her most vivid and visceral work yet. Musically, producer/multi-instrumentalist Fadi Tabbal adds excursions into hyperpop and electronica to the duo's industrial-drone-ambient palette. The pair's enduring friendship translates into a rare kind of synergy, recalling collaborations such as Virginia Astley and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Broadcast's Trish Keenan and James Cargill, or Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise's work on 'Twin Peaks'.Beyond the sonic parallels, Snakeskin's world shares with 'Twin Peaks' an unsettling eerie quality. Angelic, celestial beauty enclosing darkness and rot. It's a world where 'fairies shimmer' and 'church bells make no sound'; 'cats breed and die' and 'fireworks fall to the sea'. It's ethereal and otherworldly, yet deeply grounded in the reality of the duo's life in Beirut. A reality perhaps best illustrated by 'Waiting', in which Sabra borrows Etel Adnan's text 'To Be In A Time Of War'. Tabbal's synths tick like clocks and ring like bells as Sabra monotones enumerations of mundane acts of life during wartime - the automatisms pile up, the words interlace, everything blurs.Sabra's own words skew more poetic but are still granular and precise, full of visceral and intimate detail: 'Hollow-eyed, blind in the sun / My teeth sink into my jaw / My cheeks burn into my tongue/ My fingers dance around the gun'. Tabbal's production is positively alive, from the glassy ambience of 'In My Life' to the snarling warped drums of 'Sunburst'. There are surprising pop moments too, like 'Homecoming', it's auto-tune and highlife-like percussion recalling the experimental pop stylings of Caroline Polachek.Snakeskin's self-titled debut (2022) had come on the heels of the Beirut port explosion. The city and it's people were changed forever. Sabra and Tabbal took a scalpel to it's heart and dragged out it's content, transmuting the death, the grief, the violence into a stunning piece of music. 'They Kept Our Photographs' carries on that work at a similarly distressing time, as it was written in parallel to the genocide in Gaza and the violence enacted against South Lebanon. And yet the album is lyrically bookended by love songs. On 'In My Life', Sabra repeats 'I will love', over and over again. On 'Anyway', she makes good on that promise: 'I fell for you / fell in way too deep'. The title's 'photographs' read like the archives of a post-apocalyptic world, records of what we've left behind. And what is left but love?
