Wabi Sabi has given us a song that feels like a thick blanket draped over a cold, buzzing wire. Their new single, "Nightmares," is not so much a lullaby as a life raft: a reggae-rooted mantra meant to soothe the soul while keeping at least one foot planted on terra firma of hard-won reality. "Nightmares" is a song for children waking up from a nightmare and even more so for adults who may have just realized they're getting one. But Wabi Sabi doesn't deliver sermons or freak out. Instead, they invite you to sway, to sing along, to breathe. It's protest music in the disguise of comfort food.
Written in a small village in Bosnia-Herzegovina where the night sky used to reverberate with the distant percussion of war. The sound of the gunfire wasn't nearby, but the mountains helped it travel so that it sounded as if it was coming from all directions, creating what can only be described as an auditory illusion of danger. And yet, as the band's frontman Damian Cartier so poetically points out, the villagers greeted the disasters with smiles and resilience every day. Two losses, a cow and a pig, and yet, somehow, they lived with a peace most of us can't fully conceive of.
The bridge does its best to recreate that mountain-surround soundscape, giving you a taste of that tension, but the chorus yanks you back into the light with an infectious rhythm that feels like dancing barefoot on the first warm spring day. If reggae has always been about redemption, then "Nightmares" is a master class in alchemizing anxiety into something that grooves. But what makes this song particularly relevant is its brilliant parallel to contemporary life. We're no longer avoiding the sound of gunfire reverberating through mountain passes but the digital static of misinformation and pings that feel infinite.
"Nightmares" asks us to adjust our framing to deepen the track into a groove, as the band's tagline says. It's hope you can hum. It's a reminder that fear does not get the last verse, no matter how loud. And "Nightmares" isn't the only one to walk the line between the philosophical and the playful; Wabi Sabi has always done that. It's wisdom with a wink, the song that shows you how to dance with your eyes open.
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