Carebender CAREBENDER - BAGS LP

Carebender's highly charged album, the music, the underlying themes and the group itself form something together that is more than sound. ‘Bags’—that is, both baggage and burden—is at its core a collaborative act of songwriting, playing, recording, and editing: in bringing the music to life.
Still, amid all this teamwork the group never loses sight of the individual. There is no striving for a smooth product or bourgois perfection. While the songs differ in texture, varying from silky kindness in the opening track ‘one or’ to brazen bellowing in the following track ‘enter fast’, they share the same impulse to contest and protest the powers that be. Lyrically, Carebender moves between abstraction and direct address, pairing political charge with personal stakes. Whether heavily edited, as in ‘Mirror Arp’, or voice-memo-like, as in ‘Rain Arp’, Carebender frames protest in many forms, always grounded in presence, never passive.
After their self-titled debut on BlauBlau in 2022, Carebender is set to release their sophomore album on a network of four labels. For this fervor of voices, protest is as key as collaboration.