Their anticipated debut album, Revival Of A Friend, is due out June 28th.
Bay Area slowcore trio Sour Widows release “Big Dogs,” the beguiling final single from their anticipated debut album, Revival Of A Friend, due June 28th on Exploding In Sound Records.
Of the song, Maia Sinako says “Once upon a time there were two twin brothers named Albert and Henry. They lived in a beautiful house at the end of a long quiet street. Albert and Henry were very big and strong, so big and so strong people were almost scared of them when they walked by. But on the inside, Albert and Henry felt small, like children, afraid of the world and the people in it. That’s why they stayed in the beautiful house at the end of the long quiet street. Out of sight, undisturbed, the twin brothers ran free, rolling in the leaves on the lawn, chasing birds, or cats into trees. Because they were dogs. The biggest dogs I’ve ever seen.”
Sour Widows are hitting the road this summer and fall in support of Revival Of A Friend on tours with Teethe and youbet. Tickets are available now via sourwidows.com
In the seven years since Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson started Sour Widows, they have survived a litany of tragedies and tribulations. Sinaiko lost a partner to an accidental overdose just before the band began. Thomson’s mother was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which she lived with for four years before passing away in June 2021. As they prepared to enter Oakland’s Tiny Telephone in 2023 to make an album partly of songs about navigating those losses and the lives they shaped, more troubles mounted, including a traumatic breakup and Thomson’s father’s sudden cancer diagnosis.
Sour Widows has served as an essential outlet for Sinaiko, Thomson, and drummer Max Edelman, a way to process real-time woes so as to transmute them into something beautiful, useful, real, and lasting. It has been an anchor, too, keeping them lashed to reality as the world roiled around them. Revival Of A Friend, the band’s entrancing and powerful debut album is their collective testament to that process, an hour-long lesson in endurance that is years in the making.
Inspired by the folk singing of their youth, the grit and grace of Joni Mitchell, the slowly spiraling dazzle of Duster and Bedhead, and the steady angularity and sudden snarl of Slint, Revival of a Friend fully recognizes the arbitrary cruelty of individual existence and finds that some of the best ways beyond it are to share harmonies, a tangle of electric guitars, or a song that simply imagines hope somewhere on the other side. Methodically built over many years, the album is a poignant and gripping record about the pain of growing up and getting on with it.
6/16: Davis, CA - Davis Music Festival
6/20: San Diego, CA - Voodoo Room ^
6/21: Santa Ana, CA - Constellation Room ^
7/10: Seattle, WA - Sunset Tavern
7/11: Portland, OR - Mississippi Studios
7/13: San Francisco, CA - The Independent
7/27: Los Angeles, CA - Zebulon
9/5-9/7: Raleigh, NC - Hopscotch Festival
9/9: Atlanta, GA - 529 Club *
9/10: Nashville, TN - DRKMTTR *
9/11: Ashville, NC - Eulogy *
9/12: Washington, DC - Comet Ping Pong *
9/13: Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda's *
^ w/ Teethe
* w/ youbet
1. Big Dogs
2. Revival
3. Witness
4. I-90
5. Initiation
6. Gold Thread
7. Cherish
8. FTGE
9. Shadow Of A Dove
10. Staring Into Heaven/Shining
Photo Credit: Jaxon Whittington
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