A few months ago I had this conversation with Sean, drummer of the cult band Swell, about one of his songs and its video: “(It’s Time to) Move On”.
Sean was visualising and putting into his video the view of the Californian coast, while I, with the typical acoustic guitar sound of deep America, was visualising the desert.
What struck me about Big Brave’s “In Grief or in Hope” is that, again, I have a visualisation of every song on this album, as a whole summarising what it meant to be a windsurfer in Brittany (France) in the 90s, just not in the right order:
- “Verdure”: it is like a call, a call for the storm to come tomorrow, a call for our windsurfer peers to gather together, excited for the day to come.
- “Skin Ripper”: you wake up early, you gather at the beach and prepare your sail and board, adjusting every tiny detail in order to get full power once on the sea. You see your peers, your friends, arriving one by one. Sometimes you meet new windsurfers, but usually it is just a small bunch of crazy guys, always the same team. A team that windsurfs at least six months a year while at college, or all year round once working. A team that has been windsurfing there for the last 15 years, sometimes longer for the real pioneers.
- “The Ineptitude for Mutual Discernment”: clouds are coming. We know it, we feel it, sometimes up to two hours in advance. We feel the wind and the rain coming. We see people walking back home. We see the last catamarans, the fastest and last boats before the storm, or the non-local windsurfers going home because they can’t sustain what’s coming. We take our smallest board and sail, the board that can’t support you and sinks when there is no strong wind, the one that makes us so light, like being a snowflake on top of the big waves. We wait on the beach until it is time, time to fight the elements.
- “What May Be the Kindest Way to Leave”: entering the cold water, fighting the first waves at full speed, going for bigger and bigger ones far from the coast, having fun with pure dark water below, pure dark clouds above, heavy rain, an end-of-the-world sensation, feeling real for once, surfing beautifully in ecstasy.
- “In Grief or in Hope”: you adjust to the storm, you fine-tune your equipment back on the beach, you battle again with the waves and eventually get to the deep water, with high waves and more space in between, more space to ride, to surf.
- “An Uttering of Antipathy”: this is exactly the sensation you have when, almost at the top of a giant wave, you suddenly get projected far away from your board at full speed. Water feels like rock at this speed, and you are already anticipating the next two or three big waves before reaching your board again, in dark, dark water. Then, back on the board, you resume windsurfing, and your ecstasy is supernatural, transcendental. No need for drugs, you can achieve the same thing through windsurfing. The beauty and brutality of it all, the beauty of the board, sail, water, body, rain, wind. You become one with it all. You are complete.
- “A Shape of Shame”: the wind is dying down, the clouds are less aggressive, maybe a bit of sun is coming through. We are exhausted after up to nine hours at sea. The wind is still strong at times, the sea is becoming bluer, less dark, or at least no longer deep black. We speed back home, easily surfing the last remaining waves.
- “Holding Tongue”: night is coming, our boards and sails are still on the beach. We sit there, exhausted, and discuss the day, where we went, what we lived through, sharing the experience of an excitement that matters, because this is the closest thing on earth to God, if you believe in it, or even if you don’t.
What struck me too is that my method for selecting the best albums of the year is to create a playlist of all these albums throughout the year and delete any song that is not a top one, one by one, by listening to the playlist randomly all year long. And every single song on Big Brave’s album survived this torture chamber, which may qualify it as the best album of 2026, or at least the one bringing me the most emotion.
Another important thing: this is mostly a Björk-like voice and a guitar, no drums, no bass, but despite that, we are talking here about real, plain songs, sometimes with a chorus, sometimes with just words. Is it post-post-rock? Cathedral music? Drone, as we say nowadays? We couldn’t care less about the words used to describe this music. It is simply genius.
If you liked the TV series “Vikings”, you will immediately understand another possible visualisation for this album: the hard life and struggle of Vikings in the cold and rain, either in their ships at sea or in the cruel battles to come once they land somewhere. This is dark-times, violent-times, extreme-life-conditions, death-kind-of music.
I saw Big Brave live in 2018, when drums were still part of the band, around the release of the beautiful and powerful “Ardor” album. Since then, Big Brave have come back with other beautiful albums, among them “Leaving None But Small Birds”, on which they explored a more medieval sound, magnificent too.
I see Big Brave climbing on the Album of the Year website, which summarises the opinions of magazines and listeners worldwide. I hope they will get the praise they deserve.
In the meantime, I encourage you to run to their gigs. The London one is not yet sold out, which is an offence to such a major indie rock band.
Review by Laurent – Speaker at The Record Club and founder of concertandvinyl.com
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