Sour Widows – “Choke Chain” [Video]

Video · Julia’s War Recordings

Sour Widows Go Heavy on the Doom-Laced “Choke Chain”

The Bay Area duo share the final preview of their sophomore album Sigil, out October 23 via Julia’s War Recordings, and it is their most viscerally physical song yet.

Sour Widows have been building toward Sigil all year, and “Choke Chain” is the last thing they’re sharing before the album arrives Thursday. It earns that closing-preview slot. Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson lock into something slower and heavier here than most of what they’ve shown from the record, the doom guitars lumbering under marching drums while the two of them sit right at the edge of the song’s violence. The track is about desire and its complications, and the music does exactly what the lyric asks of it.

Sigil is their second album, following 2024’s Revival of a Friend, and it was made with producer Melina Duterte (Jay Som, boygenius) in downtown Los Angeles. The album maps a stretch of time in which everything feels like it’s ending and everything keeps going anyway: a genocide, a breakup, a parent lost, a city changing around you. But the record insists on defiance. “Ostensible disaster ushers in a new start,” as the press materials put it, and you can feel that push-pull in “Choke Chain” as clearly as anywhere on the record. It’s a song about something difficult, and it doesn’t look away.

The band heads out Thursday on a full fall tour with Squirrel Flower, 20 dates from St. Louis through Chicago. Sigil is available for pre-order on tape, CD, and vinyl, including a Julia’s War exclusive splatter vinyl limited to 200 copies.

Pre-Order Sigil ↗

1Sigil

2Her Garden

3Still Warm

4Lucky Star

5Blood In The Grass

6Choke Chain

7White Horse

8Inanimate Angels

9Godspeed (Your Love)

10Lullaby

11Wounds Of Purification