Dublin’s Scattered Ashes return with a new double AA-side single: We Sell Silence / Prisoners, a pairing that brims with immediacy and consequence. Written after a stretch of shows across America and France, the release carries the weight of long nights spent on stages where the music must both wound and console.
We Sell Silence presses hard against the numbness of political impotence. It is a work steeped in the awareness of injustice, where the immovable weight of power becomes its own instrument. A caustic synth figure gnaws relentlessly, as if tracing the outline of a wound that refuses to close. Voices rise through the circuitry, strained yet resolute, and what follows is less a protest than a proof of existence: the heart speaking into history’s void, knowing it may be swallowed yet uttering its claim all the same. The song breathes with the electricity of the present moment, carrying a sense of claustrophobia that feels both personal and planetary. The track has kinship with the likes of Then Comes Silence or None Shall Remain through its command of atmosphere.
The gut-punching Prisoners bends inward, reckoning with suicidal thought and the fatal arithmetic of fate. Here, Scattered Ashes lean into restraint, paring back to stark guitars and a skeletal drum machine. Each note lands like a confession. The vocal line, solemn and spare, carries the gravity of late-night conversations when the room itself seems to lean closer, bringing to mind Chameleons, The The and Bauhaus. If We Sell Silence confronts the cruelty of a world unbent, Prisoners dwells within the private space where endurance itself feels precarious. It is neither a hymn of surrender nor a hymn of triumph, but a meditation on staying; an acknowledgment of despair that also reveals the courage in simply breathing through it.
Listen to We Sell Silence / Prisoners below and order the double single here.
Recorded at Darklands Audio with Daniel Doherty and mastered by Pete Maher, the single feels anchored in tradition yet restless for expression. Scattered Ashes do not traffic in revivalism; their work carries the pulse of the contemporary, written with eyes wide open to the present’s terrors and tenderness. These two songs, set against each other, reveal a band willing to look unflinchingly at despair while still holding on to the spark of resistance. They write not to escape history, but to stand within it, their sound a flare in the darkness, burning because it must.
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