Alternative
Self-released · 28 August 2026
The first thing you notice about “The Righteous Sword” is a mixing decision: Kennie Mason’s voice sits right up front, close to the mic, instead of buried under reverb the way the shoegaze manual says it should be. That changes what this record is. Nine tracks, twenty-eight minutes forty-one, self-released on 28 August.
There’s more than guitars under the voice. “Cattle Driver” runs on a hip-hop drum-machine kick while the guitars stay clenched, and Mason switches to a rapped delivery in the verses; “Idle” uses flanged electronic percussion and a chorus pointed at New Order’s danceable post-punk; “Tight Rope” opens on fairground keyboards and gets to three minutes fifty-two, the second-longest thing here. “The Fear” breaks the record in half: an acoustic ballad with ambient electronics and background coos, three minutes five. Siichaq are from Atlanta and this is their third album in three years, after “My Dog Ate My Patriotism” (March 2024) and “Catcher” (August 2025).
With the voice that high the words matter, and the record knows it: the lyrics put the climate crisis and the fear of losing someone inside the same sentence. It’s also what exposes the album’s size. Nothing reaches four and a half minutes (the longest is the title track at four eighteen) and four songs come in under three, so the progressions get cut just as they start. Three of the nine had already appeared as singles between June and 25 August, three days before the album.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre