Steeped in noir mystique, “Blood in the Vines”—the opener of NYC indie-rock band Sister.’s sophomore album Two Birds—showcases a band pushing toward a fresh and cathartic communal vision. The song is an excavation of shadowy power dynamics in a relationship. Co-bandleader Hannah Pruzinsky’s vocals are muted and urgent, teasing out images of violence and claustrophobia. Whirling synths crest over the driving, subterranean beat, transforming the song into a dance towards madness. The song embodies the way in which Sister.’s newest music triangulates the unguarded emotional charge of songwriters like Adrianne Lenker, Lomelda, and Florist (with whom Sister.’s regular drummer Felix Walworth also plays) with their own unique brand of refined storytelling and sonic experimentation. As a whole, Two Birds captures a group challenging themselves to preserve creative egalitarianism and all the personal intimacy that comes with it. It is an inventive, devastating, and confident statement, exploring relationships that drift apart before folding back into each other, embodying togetherness and apartness in both its lyrics and musical forms.
It took time, experimentation, and systematically abandoning self-consciousness for Sister. to reach the point of being able to make a record like Two Birds. The story of the band’s development is a testament to the deep, almost unfathomably close personal and artistic bond between lead singers Ceci Sturman and Pruzinsky (whose first full-length album as h. pruz arrived last year). As college roommates, the two initially bonded over poetry, sharing their own work and writing collaboratively. As their friendship grew—resulting in nearly a decade living and working on myriad creative projects together—the prototype duo version of Sister. increasingly became their artistic focal point. As they began to explore their own relationship in their work, they embarked down a path of total, mutual honesty that feels truly rare in its intimacy and emotional acuity. Together, they began to write disarming, melodically crystalline modern folk songs exploring the rare beauty of profound and close friendship, as well as its pitfalls. Eventually, they incorporated guitarist and producer James Chrisman into the group in 2020, at that time largely to support Sturman and Pruzinsky’s pre-existing compositions. By the time of 2023’s ambitious, stylistically wide-ranging LP Abundance, however, the three were often writing as a unit. On that album, they pushed their co-writing process and textural palette to new exhilarating extremes, from electronic pop to the noisy fringes of rock.
And then—as cohabitations with the best friends of your formative years usually do—Sturman and Pruzinsky’s era as roommates came to an end. The change came at a time of new beginnings and self-consideration for both, as the two both strengthened new relationships and became more independent than ever. Together and separately, Sister. began to flesh out the conflicted feelings around this transition in the songs that became Two Birds, with a collective approach that served as an excuse to debrief and assess as well as push the creative possibilities of the band—now a mature, fully formed quartet—towards unexplored emotional and musical terrain. Every member of the ensemble was in the room when an important decision had to be made. It was typical for someone to play melodies written by someone else. The group sometimes wrote lyrics popcorn-style, and took turns on synth and guitar pedals mimicking the chaotic trajectory of their lyrics. Collaboratively, they charted a musical EKG of a transformative period that might well have felt too overwhelming to unpack or write about meaningfully from just one perspective.
Fittingly, the songs on Two Birds often revolve thematically around the subjectivity of our views of others—the unknowable things about a person beyond the margins of our devotion to them, and the way our imaginations fill in these gaps. Even when the members of the group are not writing directly about one another on Two Birds, they sketch portraits of other people from the outside—family members, former lovers, lost friends—exploring different perspectives on a shared event or moment. (”Two stories/two birds in the wall,” Pruzinsky and Sturman sing in the stratospheric chorus of the slowcore-reminiscent title track.) Reflecting on a friend’s relationship gone wrong and assuming their perspective, Pruzinsky and Sturman harmonize together against a woozy bass riff in the churning acoustic march “Piece of Silver”: “Are you just another story or a memory to walk through?” There are moments in these songs where the protagonists find themselves fully alone, even if others are close by—see, for instance, the aching sensation of being “empty in a room of your affection” in “Star.” In the songs on Two Birds, the greatest emotional resonance comes at the moments we project our experiences on things left just out of frame.
On Two Birds, more than on any previous Sister. release, the arrangements shade the emotionally unsparing text, with a darker and more unified identity that their earlier releases. James’ guitar imprimatur feels like a central character in the album’s most expansive songs, locking in with drummer and multi-instrumentalist Felix Walworth’s distinctive feel to create healthy spasms of chaos (see the top-of-the-phrase fills that push the drama of the hallucinatory, Americana-inflected “Power” forward). The ominous chatter and twangy ostinatos of Chrisman’s playing (which, as he puts it, eschews solos in favor of “either melody or chaos”) recalls the raw catharsis of first-wave emo as well as, at turns, Marc Ribot on a Tom Waits track. Instrumental hooks anchor several of the record’s most indelible songs—notably, the bends and stabs that propel forward the grunge-inflected anthem “Honey,” in which Sturman’s murmured, conversational phrasing recalls Kim Gordon. Coming courtesy of Walworth and the rest of the band, electronics and synthesizers provide powerful word-painting through the album; static and glitching keyboards flood the mix like scrambled broadcasts from another’s consciousness.
Even when their faith in their relationship seems to be being tested, Sturman and Pruzinsky use their voices to bolster each other throughout Two Birds. The many seasons their songwriting and friendship have weathered together are evident in every aspect of these songs—their ability to leave space for each other and the listener, to provide areas for our imagination to wander, finding lines with intensely personal emotional resonance that map meaningfully onto our own relationships. Two Birds is a rare feat, with songs full of windswept space, patient arcs, and cathartic moments of release, in which new interactions within the music reveal themselves with repeated listening.