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Not long ago, Maia Sinaiko had a nightmare that morphed into an epiphany. While they slept, Sinaiko imagined that the world was ending, that the Earth itself was about to be swallowed by a black hole. From their perch in an old bedroom in a long-ago apartment, Sinaiko saw that physics itself was rupturing—water ran in reverse, doors locked and unlocked without a touch, traffic lights hung upside down. All traces of human civilization would soon be obliterated, our collective efforts lost forever; no one would ever know, Sinaiko realized in their nocturnal terror, about the films their sister had made. Sinaiko cried to their father, who responded to this looming end-of-everything scenario with an unexpected bit of sanguine wisdom: “But it could be amazing.” 

This is the premise of the opening title track of Sigil, the second album by Sour Widows, the Bay Area band Sinaiko started nearly a decade ago now with fellow songwriter, singer, and guitarist Susanna Thomson. That feeling of hope slithering from dark corners permeates most every track of the album; named for a dream that Thomson had about making a record called “Sigil”, the record navigates the wasteland of human cruelty and loss only to emerge with defiant and hard-won hope. Awful things happen during Sigil. A genocide leaves bodies rotting in the sun. Lovers subjugate their counterparts with empty promises, emotional cruelty, and physical dominance. Parents are lost, leaving behind chasms that only seem to grow. But these conflicts and crises alternately produce righteous rage, welcome solidarity, and revelatory freedom. Sigil sounds like a musical breakthrough for Sour Widows, and its songs about persevering and growing feel like personal breakthroughs, too. An end is always nearby here. What comes after can always be amazing.

Since Sinaiko and Thomson made their debut, Revival of a Friend, with drummer Max Edelman and bassist Timmy Stabler in 2024, the band has been out of the Bay a lot, from opening for Alex G across Europe to headlining in the Midwest during a sweltering summer. They’ve had several realizations on the road. First, standing onstage every night and filling open air with sound is actual magic, an act of real-time creation that feels nothing short of alchemy. Second, as Sinaiko and Thomson both crossed the threshold of 30, the childhood friends and current roommates accepted anew that this is their life, that the expected domestic niceties of home ownership or stable relationships or raising children must continue to yield to the exigencies of this art they make together. And, finally, after playing the six- and eight-minute tangles that framed so much of Revival of a Friend each day, they understood that there were other exciting ways to approach their craft. Maybe they could write simpler songs, using classic “cowboy chords” and built on refrains that could be shouted out by a crowd. Maybe that might even leave more room for studio experimentation?

Sour Widows push all of this to the fore on Sigil, an album informed by the magic of mere existence and the possibility of the unknown, from sound to substance. For the first time, the band headed south to record, convening with acclaimed producer and Jay Som mastermind Melina Duterte at Seahorse Studios in downtown Los Angeles. Organ roars at the climax of the tender and defiant “Her Garden,” while electronics screech through the twists and turnarounds of the arcing and aspiring “Lucky Star.” Cello howls behind opener “Sigil,” and violin moans beneath acoustic closer “Wounds of Purification.” These are new choices and textures for Sour Widows. 

The songs themselves are the most magnetic Sour Widows have ever written, too, like the hook of self-liberation Thomson offers during “Her Garden” or the chorus of self-actualization that Sinaiko nails during “Lucky Star.” Lumbering with doom guitars and marching drums, “Choke Chain” rides the line between the violence and gentleness of sex, its soft harmonies and snarling sound perfectly capturing this fundamental conflict. These 11 numbers curve in unexpected directions, but there is a newfound immediacy to Sigil, as if Sour Widows have urgent findings to share.

They do: Thomson’s mom was a clairvoyant, and Sinaiko grew up in a home of artists and performers, people able to conjure worlds out of nothing but sheer imagination. In recent years, the two have grown more interested in the power of what we cannot perceive, understand, or explain—black holes, past lives, the endlessness of energy. These phenomena point to the ways that what we perceive as an endpoint is possibly just a new beginning, a chance to reorder and reorient what we think that we know. Throughout Sigil, ostensible disaster ushers in a new start.

Written by Thomson for Babehoven’s Maya Bon, “Blood in the Grass,” for instance, is a gorgeous and aching ode to friendship, to the way that two people who have endured so much loss can hold one another up and push one another along. If its acoustic guitars sound delicate at the beginning, the radiant electric tones and dovetailing harmonies sound like armor by the end. Written by Sinaiko, who is Jewish and of Assyrian descent, “Lullaby” presents a harrowing portrait of genocide in Palestine. It slowly morphs into a screed of retribution, though, with Sinaiko speaking, singing, and screaming their hopes for comeuppance in the song’s second half. When Sinaiko played “Lullaby” for Thomson, it inspired her to write its chaser and the album’s graceful closer, “Wounds of Purification.” “Reverse create/every possible life,” Thomson sings. “Until you’re holding me/in the well of light.” Like almost all of Sigil, it is a prayer for what could still be, presented against the pain of the present.

Sour Widows was born out of and also into hard times. Around the time the band began, Thomson’s mother had just been diagnosed with cancer, to which she succumbed just after the release of the band’s second EP. In the years since, partners have been lost, other parents have gotten sick, and the Bay they have long loved as home has been subject to a kind of techno-fascist gentrification in total opposition to the values of Sour Widows and their wider community. An action as much as an album, Sigil feels like a rejoinder to all that, pushing against horrors and saying it doesn’t have to be this way, that there is so much unknown left to explore and indulge in this life—and probably the next one, too. 

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