Photo by Aimee Church

It’s said that drowning elicits — after some initial panic — a calming feeling filled with hallucinations as your brain incurs hypoxia. Listening to “Purgatory” sounds like you’re sinking further and further into that abyss, and with the abyss being as dark as it is infinite, this is territory which Russian Baths dive right into with ease on the latest preview off the band’s sophomore effort, Mirror. What’s becoming most alluring in the craft of the Brooklyn art rock duo of co-vocalists and guitarists Jess Rees and Luke Koz since their 2020 debut, Deepfake, is how locked into a state of being, mind and body, they are in their sound in whatever they’re taking the form of. Oft, we ascribe anything tangent of shoegaze as being dreamlike in its tangible properties, but here, surrounding a scintillating post-punk riff that lures you in, they turn it into water — calm and clear on its surface, yet inescapable once its current grabs hold of you. “Under sun / Lost at sea / Clear your lungs / And dive after me,” sings Koz’s siren song. Rees’ quiet screams soon call out in the distance, “I’m lost in the wave.” The further down you go into it, the more volatility there is. In a certain sense, it’s just like you’re floating into a state of limbo. There just may not be any way of waking up from this kind of dream…

Russian Bath’s Mirror will be released June 14th on Good Eye Records.