reviews / 2025

POSTCARDS - Ripe

Name: POSTCARDS – Ripe
Item: Ripe
Rating: 7
Author: Claudio Lancia

2025 (Ruptured)

dream-pop, nu-gaze

by Claudio Lancia

I Postcards are a pivotal band in the recent evolution of the scene dream-pop, having produced some of the finest pages dreamy of the 2020s. It's no coincidence that they're the ones to open the narrative of "Music Diary", the book I wrote for Arcana together with my colleague Alessio Belli. Their second album, "The Good Soldier, came out right at the turn of the decade, on January 3, 2020, just before the pandemic brought everything and everyone to a halt for months, with catastrophic repercussions for the live music sector, which stayed shut down for an extremely long time. The following year brought another excellent record, After The Fire, Before The End, while the terms shoegaze and nu-gaze" went viral on TikTok among the younger generations, a perfect expression of the increasingly widespread sense of unease and disorientation. After that, we somewhat lost track of Postcards, partly because their most recent release, "In Parenthesis Vol. 1", was only put out via Bandcamp.

In 2025 the trio is ready to return with the nervous unease of "I Stand Corrected", a sumptuous track that kicks off with guitar-driven swagger on "Ripe", immediately followed by "Dust Bunnies", the single that preceded the album by a few days, a long list of frustrations stemming from life in Lebanon, a land of conflict that, from a musical standpoint, we still know far too little about.

From Postcards' musical evolution, it's not hard to sense the countless days spent in their Beirut bedrooms consuming records by Slowdive, Cocteau Twins and Beach House, searching for a formula able to crystallize beauty and fragility, but also anger and disillusionment, elements you can feel running through their compositions. A primordial anger, passed down through generations, a raw and determined response to the turmoil the region continues to endure — themes that unfortunately remain all too current, with Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza and its attacks on southern Lebanon.

Postcards channel this violence into their music, sketching out dreamlike scenarios in which the guitars cut through the canvas like blades. "Ripe" is born of pain and uncertainty, a defiant record that blends brutality and vulnerability, noise and melody. Like a beacon lit in the fog, it searches (in vain?) for a possible way out: titles like "Ruins" and "Construction Site" undoubtedly take on an even deeper meaning when read in this light.

There's a fire burning within the cutting electric gusts of "Poison", which aim to portray the same lost innocence depicted in the early work of U2, that fire symbolically sketched out through various crescendoing passages. Other facets of their musical prism include the hushed, pathos-laden poetry of "Wasteland Rose", the slow, melancholy pace of "Nine", the more direct and full-bodied "Colorblind", the enveloping embrace of "Angel", and the jazzy delicacy of "Dark Blue", which closes the album with immense refinement.

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31/03/2025

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Claudio Lancia, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition