The Crab Apples sing of hope on ‘Talk about peace’

With guitars that channel post-punk urgency and pop sensitivity, The Crab Apples turn exhaustion into hope, placing conversation and empathy at the heart of their response to an increasingly fractured world.

Some songs arrive as a protest, others as a refuge. The Crab Apples choose to inhabit both spaces with ‘Talk about peace’, the second preview of their upcoming fourth album, due this autumn. Following the release of ‘Treinta’, the Barcelona band continues to refine its indie rock language while confronting the emotional fatigue of living through permanent crisis.

The band insists that “we truly believe that the first step towards achieving peace is to talk about it. In fact, it is one of the most powerful things we can do as citizens, and very often the first reaction is to dismiss it as naïve, when it should actually be our main goal as a society.” They describe peace as “a shared dream that we hope this generation can fulfil” and add that, although “we’re living through very dark times and it’s very hard to imagine it right now, our small commitment is this: let’s talk about it, let’s imagine a better world and let’s work collectively to make it happen.”

Asked about the references to Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman, The Crab Apples explain: “We mentioned these two wonderful artists and songwriters because we feel inspired by the way they address social and political issues in their songs. Making music is, for us, our greatest passion, but it is also a way of channelling our emotions. And within all the complexity of being human, those emotions range from love and heartbreak to uncertainty and collective anger. We undoubtedly find in many female songwriters and performers the voices and stories that inspire us to tell our own stories and raise our voices too.”

Reflecting on the new album, the band says: “Our next album is at a stage of maturity that we find very interesting. We know more clearly than ever who we are and what we want to say and communicate. That is reflected both in the sound and production of the songs, which we developed together with Víctor Valiente and Ariana Abecasis, and in the lyrics themselves. They are the most autobiographical lyrics we have written so far and they reflect very clearly the moment in life we are going through. We talk about the ‘crisis’ – we like to put it in quotation marks because it depends on the day – of turning thirty, insecurities, routines, the world around us and how we perceive it; about the people who help us better manage fear, doubt and helplessness in the face of wars, the climate crisis and so many other atrocities happening today. In reality, the album is something like a snapshot of the moment we are living through.”