Atsuko Chiba – Atsuko Chiba
Atsuko Chiba’s fourth self-titled album, out April 24 on Mothland/The Orchard, is six tracks of introspective experimental rock from a Montreal quintet that knows exactly how much to hold back.
This wasn’t on my radar until “Retention” landed in W06, which is embarrassing given it’s their fourth album, but that’s sometimes how it goes. The single stopped me cold. I went back to Jinn, Trace, Water, It Feels Like It’s Growing, the two EPs, and took the time to understand who this band actually is.
Anthony Piazza (drums, percussion, electronic drums), David Palumbo (bass, bass VI, vocals), Eric Schafhauser (guitar, synthesizers), Karim Lakhdar (vocals, guitar, synthesizers), and Kevin McDonald (synthesizers, guitar) built the record through free-form improvisation at their home studio, Room 11, no fixed plans, just playing and recording, deliberately cutting out certain instruments to force new directions. The result doesn’t sound uncontrolled. It sounds like a band that trusts itself enough to leave space. Distorted guitars, which drove most of the earlier records, are mostly gone here. In their place: keyboards that push forward, subtler percussion, bass lines doing most of the structural work, and vocals treated as a real compositional element rather than decoration. The band produced everything themselves, with Matthew Cerantola on mix and Harris Newman on mastering. Thirty-two minutes, and nothing padded.
The album opens with a triptych. “Retention” sets the tone: a trip-hop pulse without the sampling, deep bass, syncopated drums, and Lakhdar’s voice treated with reverb and echo. Halfway through, a guitar with a liquid feel enters, then a choir pushes the track into something close to trance. Lakhdar describes it as a story about a boy haunted by ghosts, gathering fragments of memory into effigies and burning them one by one to free the spirits. “When all the effigies have turned to ash, will the boy finally be free, or will he always carry the guilt of the past”, the question sits under the whole album.
“Pretense” slows things further, a hypnotic bass line and electronic layers holding still while the drums stay restrained for a long opening stretch. What follows mid-track is a switch into saturated sound, harmonics suddenly filling out what had been deliberately minimal. Lakhdar has said that “Pretense” and “Future Ways” were initially designed as a single piece, both circling grief, memory, and what comes after. “Future Ways” extends the logic: heavier bass movement, and around the four-minute mark, the rhythm fragments. Keyboards turn dissonant and oppressive before the track dissolves.
“Tar Sands” breaks from the trilogy with a harder, syncopated rhythm and a shrill drone, dealing in resource depletion and mental exhaustion at the same time, with a chorus treated to a production effect that recalls early 70s Floyd.
“Torn”, the second single, covered here in W12, follows a protagonist who builds a false reality to earn trust, loses himself in it, and ends up at the edge of a cliff, not knowing how long he’s been awake. Musically it’s built around the rhythm section, synthesizers and layered vocals doing the structural work, holding tension until a shift near the end that makes the lyrical ambiguity land. Cold wave guitar closes it out, recalling early Cure.
“Locked and Array” closes the record at nearly nine minutes, starting with a fragile indie-folk introduction before opening into progressive post-rock. It’s an odd ending that either deliberately leaves things unresolved or genuinely belongs on a different record, depending on where you land.
What I keep coming back to is “Retention” specifically, that choir entrance in the final stretch that arrives without announcement and just takes over. It was the first thing I heard from this band and it’s still the moment that made me want to follow the rest.
The self-titled move signals something. This is the record Atsuko Chiba decided to put their name on in full, a consolidation after three albums and two EPs. The closing track may sit at an angle to the rest, but Atsuko Chiba is the biggest surprise the Album Spotlight has turned up in 2026 so far.
