Lebanese Interbellum Releases 'Our House is Very Beautiful at Night'

Beirut based singer-songwriter Karl Mattar is joined by drummer Pascal Semerdjian (of Postcards) to deliver Interbellum's third album. Centered around the acoustic guitar, and produced in the lockdown period of 2020-2021, the album carries on the mantle from Interbellum’s previous album ‘Dead Pets, Old Griefs’, with a closer look at the themes of trauma, loss, and hauntology.

According to the album’s liner notes, “‘Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night’ explores the idea of ghosts as intergenerational trauma, on a personal and collective level. The 15 tracks deal with memory, time and the past, casting intimate trauma as a microcosm of Lebanon’s unending cycles of violence, unearthing the crypts where memories and postmemories lie buried.”

The album kicks off with the track ‘Archeology’ and what a kick that is, sending you back to the heart of a garage to declare lines like, "day break finds us stranded in a dream” and later “the past and future echoing across a common canyon.”

The lyrics are accompanied by anarchic guitar riffs alongside massive buildups and breakdowns, which serve to represent Lebanon’s collective trauma described in the liner notes as “the post-civil-war generation which has inherited these ghosts.”