The Long Road: In Conversation with Postcards’ Julia Sabra & Pascal Semerdjian

One of the many DIY labels across the world that operates in the shadows, now in its third decade, Lebanon’s Ruptured Records has been one of the most vital sources across the underground landscape.

Offering a wellspring for discovery and possibilities beyond, the Beirut-based label, co-founded by Ziad Nawfal and Fadi Tabbal, has existed amid a backdrop of ceaseless turmoil. The recent attacks from Israel, the latest on a city still recovering from the 2020 port explosion which followed Lebanon’s financial collapse a year prior.

While perhaps considered a foot note by the masses, it’s local underground artistic communities and labels like Ruptured that provide hope to the devoted few. A key to escape and create, and 2025 has begun strongly for the label, starting with February releases from Nour Sokhon & Stefan Christoff and Camille Cabbabe. In conjunction with German label T3, it’s Ruptured’s third release that is perhaps the most precious jewel from the crown: Beirut three-piece, Postcards, who release their fourth LP, Ripe.

Formed in 2012 by vocalist/guitarist Julia Sabra (Snakeskin), bassist Marwan Tohme, and drummer Pascal Semerdjian (Sanam), Postcards has been melting hearts since their 2015 debut EP, What Lies So Still.

On a foundation of what many would considered shoegaze and dream-pop, while the band has moved sonically with each release, the Postcards remit has been held together by the emotive storytelling of Sabra, and on Ripe it reaches a crescendo.

Fraught with tension and the chaos that overshadows every day life in Lebanon, Postcards frame it through song, and while you can certainly draw a line to this in previous works (2021’s After the Fire, Before the End) on Ripe the band are at their all-encompassing best, reaching new levels.

Beginning with the transcendental I Stand Corrected. An electrifying dispatch of fuzz and feedback rolling through the speakers, it’s Postcards muddling through the mire. Sabra’s vocal performance, like a clarion call in the face of uncertainty.

From here, the highlights come thick and fast. The quiet/ loud maelstrom of Poison and Ruins sees Postcards showcase resilience amid the fault lines, while the dynamic 4AD-inspired dream-rock of Wasteland Rose is one of the key moments throughout Ripe. “Am I the only one / Mad enough to stay / One more day,” sings Sabra in what is as direct as Postcards has ever been.

It’s not the only time the band peels back the curtain of their tenuous, everyday realities. The pile driving post-punk of Dust Bunnies, rife with turbulence (“The magnets on your mother’s fridge / Your heartbreaking heritage / Our ancestors may have known/ There’s nowhere left go … Empires past / The sounds of broken glass”).

Then there’s the grandiose epic that is Construction Site. Postcards’ watershed moment, this sweeping, abstract tale sees Sabra stitching together a narrative that hangs on the cliff’s edge. Pure, poetic power that eclipses everything the band has ever written.

Postcards deal just as heavy in the slower moments, too. Nine hits the band’s staple emotional frequencies, while the balladeering curtain call in Dark Blue sees Postcards juxtaposing dream-like sonics against existential despair. (“Give me something new to hold onto” sings Sabra, in search of hope through the anguish.

Encapsulating the fragility that their songs offer, it’s a fitting end to Ripe. Unquestionably Postcards’ defining moment, and while perhaps the most difficult LP the band has recorded, the results are equal parts empowering and majestic.

At the beginning of the month from their Beirut base, Sabra and Semerdjian are talking with me over Zoom, where we discuss Lebanon’s DIY scene, the history of Postcards, and more.

Sun 13: Postcards has been together for 13 years now. Just how hard is it to maintain that longevity in the modern day?

Pascal Semerdjian: “We had to get married!”

Julia Sabra: (Laughs) “I think it is, in a way. It’s a joke but like any other relationship you have to maintain it, it’s hard work. It kind of helps, but it’s the fact that we’re literally a family. Pascal and Marwan are first cousins, and Pascal and I got together a few months after the band started, and we’ve been together ever since. I think that family aspect of it forces us to always work out our differences. This is already there, and we have to keep adapting and changing and growing together, which also taught us a lot about our relationship. It’s very difficult, and we’re very lucky to be able to still be doing this and still want to do this.”

S13: Is there a lot of creative tension in the band when you’re writing songs?

PS: “Yes.”

S13: Does that make the songs better?

PS: “Always.”

JS: “Definitely. I think the three of us are very outspoken and opinionated. We agree on a lot of things, but we also come from slightly different backgrounds, so there’s always a sort of tension. But that’s the beauty of it… you get to write and learn how to deal and bring out the best of the tension.”

PS: “When everyone fights for what they want in a certain track, you end up with a track that resembles the three of us. It’s very difficult, but it’s very important.”

S13: It’s interesting that you say that Pascal, because going through Postcards’ discography, I think there are a lot of nice nuances from one release to the next. Is the goal as a band to try to never make the same record twice?

JS: “I wouldn’t say it’s a goal. It’s not like we think, ‘Oh, we don’t want this to sound like anything’. I think, especially the EPs, we were still finding ourselves and our sound and were very young. But for the albums, it’s more like it really reflects where we are at a certain point in life; because our lives are so chaotic in a way, and where we live is constantly changing and things are evolving. I think this is why it feels like we’re evolving constantly. But for me, I think it’s been the same. The feeling is the same. It’s that highly sensitive, intense thing that comes out, but it’s always different depending on what we’ve been through.”

S13: I think Ripe is your best record yet. Can you tell us about the writing process behind that?

PS: “To link the previous question to this, I feel like with the previous albums, there was still experimentation where we would still try out stuff. For Ripe, it took us many years to finish, but for the first time we knew what we wanted as an outcome. It’s the first album that is 100 percent how we feel what we want to say, and because also we’re maturing [from that] younger band 10 years ago.”

JS: “We had many versions of this album. Since 2022 we’ve been writing and rewriting and recording and throwing songs out. But eventually we just sat where we recorded this album – in Pascal’s grandparents’ house; it’s empty, but we kind of took over and took up the studio and everything – we rewrote a bunch of songs there, and I feel like you can really feel that it’s a product of one thing.

“For me, it’s the album that’s the most representative of who we are as an entity, because in other albums – even though I love them all equally – you can feel, ‘Oh, this song is more Pascal, this song is more Julia, this song is more Marwan’. At least we feel it internally, and in this one, I can’t: it all feels like the energy that happens when the three of us are together. I think that’s what’s really special about it.

“It did take a long time. It was also a turning point for us, because we’d also started doing different projects. We were kind of wondering, ‘Do we want to do this anymore?’ It was a tough two years where we said, ‘No, we still want to do this, we just want to do it differently and better’. It was either we’re going to break up and stop or we’re going to continue.”

PS: “That’s basically every album.” (laughs)

JS: “Yes, but this one more than others.”

PS: “Yeah, in a healthy way.”

S13: Fadi Tabbal produced and mixed the record. Obviously, you’re in Snakeskin together, Julia. How much of an input did he have on the record?

PS: “Faddi is also family. Not by blood, but he’s practically our family. We’re very comfortable together. He’s been the fourth member of the band since day one, and he has a lot of influence on us. But I feel for this album he guided us more. Before this album, he just let us do our thing, and of course, he was there to guide us, because we had something to say. We’d been working with him on this album for three, four years.”

JS: “At every step, he’s also very helpful to let us know that at some point we had a finished recorded album, and no one was really convinced. I think it was Fadi who said. ‘Why are we doing this? Let’s redo everything’. He’s always the catalyst, but like Pascal said, this time, maybe he was more of a guide.”

S13: Going back to what you said about being in different projects, does your creative process change in comparison with your approach in Postcards?

JS: “For me, it’s really weird because I write lyrics in all the projects, but I think the project dictates how I work with it. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m going to do this for this, or this for that’. When I’m working with Fadi in Snakeskin, it’s a completely different dynamic and completely different musical direction, so what comes out of me is something a bit different, even though I feel like they’re all linked somehow.

“With Postcards, because it’s such a collaborative process – it’s us three butting heads – it’s also a very different process. There are a lot of songs also on my solo record that I had initially written and we tried with Postcards, but they didn’t work. So, I feel like I don’t separate them in my head, but each project demands something different. I don’t know how it feels for you in Sanam, Pascal?”

PS: “For me, it’s very different because of the number of people in the band. A trio is super intense, and you have to be tight all the time. It’s like three people putting their back together… if one falls, everyone falls. When we’re six, there’s way more room… like a smaller role musically. It’s pretty different for me, at least on the drums.”

S13: On Ripe, it feels like these are your most direct and dynamic songs, and it starts with I Stand Corrected. Did you have feeling that this would be the opening track after you recorded it?

JS: “I remember thinking – not just musically, with the feedback and the drums opening and everything – but also, the lyrics. ‘Oh, here we are. We live in this shit. This is it. It’s death, it’s destruction. This is not what I thought life would be like’. And then it ends with something that I want to figure out, and I think the album goes on to reflect on what it means to be here, what it means to choose to live here, what it means to feel, to love in this place, what it means to stay here. It feels like the perfect opener lyrically as well for me. As soon as we wrote that, we were like, ‘Yeah, this is going to be the one.”

PS: “It’s one of the three tracks we wrote literally a week before recording. They tied the album together, and it started making sense.”

S13: Dust Bunnies and Construction Site feel like very profound, poetic songs.

JS: “Yeah, Side A and Side B of the same thing.”

S13: There’s been great upheaval in Lebanon over the past several years… it feels like those two tracks may have drawn inspiration from these moments. Were they written early in the process?

JS: “Dust Bunnies was written in December 2022, and I think we figured it out within the next couple of months as a band. The lyrics were written before the song, which is rare. It was one of those rants that felt like it needed to be in a song.

“Construction Site came in much later, with I Stand Corrected. I think I needed to reach that moment, because Construction Site is really about acceptance. In the end, it’s like, ‘Yes, this is it, but at least there’s meaning to what’s happening’. It does feel like the album is a progression towards that. Dust Bunnies is still something that we relate to all the time in terms of a feeling… but it’s funny, because I got asked if it was written after this recent war. I guess you can analyse it in this way, but it’s one of the earlier songs.”

S13: There’s Wasteland Rose as well. Sonically, it’s beautifully rounded song, and one I would suggest to someone who perhaps wasn’t familiar with your music…

JS: “That was also one of the later songs. I think we wrote five songs right before we started recording.”

PS: “Right before recording, we had maybe 10 extra songs that we’d been playing for two years that were recorded, mixed and everything… and then we threw them away. The first version was a bit more compact with more layers and intricacy and stuff, and we were tired of this. We just wanted to play together. For example, I had to play for a couple of tracks with a click. We thought, ‘Why are we doing this? Let’s just write songs that are for three people and just record them with our energy, no clicks, nothing’.”

JS: “This was the process for a lot of them. Like Wasteland Rose where, literally, I was just playing this riff on the guitar, and everyone started playing with me, and that was it, done! I love how these come out, because when you spend this much time together, and especially these two weeks living in the same house together. Whatever came out was so tight and connected already from Wasteland Rose, I Stand Corrected, Construction Site, Poison… these songs, everything was written so quickly, and it was so simple, and that’s the beauty of it.”

S13: Dark Blue feels like the quintessential closing track that ties everything together…

JS: “That’s the only recording that we kept from the old version of the album, because that song is, I don’t know… we feel it’s very special. There’s something about the texture and the feel. And it’s always Fadi’s idea to have a really weird song to end the album that doesn’t really fit. We don’t care if it fits for the rest of the album or not, but I think thematically, it does. It’s just sonically, it’s a bit different, but we love the sound of the drums, and the way the whole thing was done.”

PS: “The vocals were recorded on a telephone.”

JS: “Yeah, I think it just gave the song what it needed, and we didn’t want to rethink it to fit the album. We just thought, ‘Okay, we’ll just put that there’. It’s impossible to play live… to recreate that feeling. I think we gave up on trying to play it.”

S13: On Dust Bunnies, you said that the lyrics came before the music, which is not usually what happens?

JS: “It’s a pretty random process. For example, I have this file on my laptop where sometimes I just write little sentences or something for the future. But with Dust Bunnies, I remember [thinking], ‘I just want to write everything that pisses me off’. And I wrote two pages of things, so I had ideas for when we sat down for the music… I just had the sheet in front of me, and I went through it basically.

“But a lot of times the music guides the lyrics. We always do this thing when we write the music together, I sing mock vocals, just to come up with melodies. A lot of times I say random words, and I find this so special, because it happens every time where these random words… my first reaction is, ‘What am I going to write instead? Because this is nothing’. And then these random words start to have meaning in a different context, and I end up leaving them there. It happens almost in every song.

“I used to think that was me being lazy, but the more I heard about songwriters’ processes and people writing, it’s almost like, unconsciously, you’re trying to say something, and you don’t know what it is. And then your intellect comes, trying to follow that thread afterwards. I like that, because I’m not a very instinctive person, so when the instinct comes out in those little moments, I like to let it be and just follow my instinct and see where it goes.

“This happened on I Stand Corrected and Construction Site as well. It started with me just singing Construction Site for no reason. I don’t know why it was on my mind… everything flowed after that. Wasteland Rose as well. The chorus was there, and I didn’t know why I was singing these words. It was just there!”

S13: The artwork is so far removed from everything that that you’ve done. Was that an early idea, or did it come together after you’d shaped the songs?

JS: “Actually, we did the artwork for the older version of the album. When we were rewriting, we wanted the music to feel more like the artwork. It inspired more than half the album. We were brainstorming with Mohamad Abdouni, the photographer, who’s an amazing artist and a great friend, and Josette [ZOoz Khalil] who’s the designer.

“We wanted to break completely visually, which is why we chose to work with Mohamad as well, but it had to feel like… when I think of ripe, it’s this feeling of intensity that’s good and bad. Especially in Arabic, the word ripe, in Lebanese dialect you use it to say, ‘I’m exhausted, I’m done, I’m drained’. It’s also ripe as in the fruit is ripe and ready to eat. How do you translate that visually? I think the idea of having water thrown in your face, but also, we made sure in the photo that I was ready to accept it… I’m not running away from it, I know it’s coming and I’m going to take it and it’s going to be annoying.

“The initial idea was to spray me with a hose at the car wash. I’m so glad we didn’t do it, because we were shooting in December. Instead, Mohamad said, ‘Come up to my house and let’s do tests, and do a day shooting stuff’. That was the very last thing that we shot. I think we all felt this. The album doesn’t feel like this, so it’s part of redoing the album and having it in your face, violent, aggressive and raw.”

S13: Talking earlier about things that make you angry, and coupled with the artwork, do you see Postcards as a political band?

JS: “The problem is what we associate with a political band is like something that’s too literal. I think everything everyone does is political. You can’t dissociate from who you are and where you live, and what you’re going to say is going to be political, in a sense. I’m not trying to send a message or anything. I’m expressing something personal that I’m feeling, and of course it relates to my context, and it’s going to resonate with people. But I think what I don’t like about being political in that sense, it feels like I’m trying to teach you a lesson, or I’m trying to impose something on you. All art is political, everyone’s thoughts, and if someone is genuinely expressing something in a certain moment, it’s going to resonate on a political level.”

PS: “Yeah. I mean, us fighting to keep this band alive in Lebanon is already political enough. It’s in our actions and being in an unstable country. Literally everything you do is, in a way, political.”

S13: Is playing live crucial to the band’s story?

JS: “Yeah, definitely. We’re lucky enough that we get to, because if you just play in Lebanon, you can play two or three shows a year, and it’s the same little crowd that’s going to come. But we’re lucky that we get to tour, and it really informs – not necessarily our writing – but a lot of times when even in previous albums, we’d record songs, then we’d go on tour and we come back, and [think], ‘Oh, let’s re-record them’ because playing them live, obviously something different came out.

“I think the intensity of touring and being together and playing live, it just really nourishes the band that brings something else out. In a sense, it’s a completely different type of context for our relationship, so it’s always really nice. At the same time, we haven’t done these super long, exhausting tours yet. We haven’t done [multiple] months of touring, so it’s still a nice, enjoyable process.”

PS: “Yeah, it’s very much the journey, not the destination, you know? If you work on an album and just put it out, it’s a bit underwhelming. But living with the album is very important for us. It’s not just releasing it.”

JS: “I think there’s really something special about playing live, especially when people are with you and they’re attuned, especially in Lebanon. There is an emotional dimension that comes through for our songs that is different everywhere we play. It’s really nice and there is something, especially because our songs are so emotional and intense… the connection that happens is really fulfilling emotionally. You feel that.”

S13: Obviously there’s a heavy community aspect to living in a country that has such a small scene. I’d imagine fellow artists support each other?

PS: “Yeah, we kind of all play in each other’s projects. Because the country is small and the scene is tight and small, it forces you to… there isn’t the aspect of playing to 1,000 people. The aspect of performing here is very much about, ‘I have something to say’, and people come and listen. It’s not like, ‘I’m going to tour 20 cities in Beirut and in Lebanon and find the common denominator for all of them’. We really don’t have this aspect.”

JS: “Yeah, at least in the alternative music scene, the entertainment aspect is almost gone. It’s very intentional in that sense.”

PS: “That’s true. It’s really encouraging for us to keep playing music. There are a lot of improv’ concerts… like everyone would do a bit of everything and you have to reinvent yourself every month, because everyone has already seen everything you’ve done.”

JS: “I was having this conversation with a musician friend who came to visit, and he said that it’s so interesting that in Beirut the experimental and the rock, pop scenes and whatever are very intertwined. That’s the freedom of being in a place where there’s no pressure. You go to a small bar… they have a little place where it fits 40 people, and there are three musicians we’ve never met before jamming, and you watch them for 30 minutes. It’s that very fluid, improvisational, experimental aspect of it, which really informs the more traditional, at least for Postcards… we’re kind of in the middle all the time. We are all involved in experimental projects, but we also love to write these structured songs, and it’s super inspiring. There are so many genres and so much talent, it’s really incredible for how small the city is and how small the country is. It’s super concentrated, and it’s basically what keeps us here. I can’t imagine making music anywhere else.”

Ripe is out via Ruptured Records / T3. Purchase from Bandcamp.