UZU - À qui la liberté? LP

For UZU أوزو, exile is not a metaphor but a condition. On their second album "À qui la liberté?", the Montreal-based quartet inhabit that state completely, tracing the uneasy line between persistence and disappearance. The title translates as “To whom belongs freedom,” a question that runs through every corner of the record. Their sound is spare and deliberate, rooted in post-punk austerity and dark repetitive punk that feels pared back to bone. Nothing rushes. Nothing occupies more space than it must.
UZU formed in Montreal during the pandemic, with members coming from Algeria, Colombia, and Quebec. That mix of distance and closeness shapes everything they record. Their self-titled debut from 2023 hinted at this tension, but "À qui la liberté?" carries its full weight.
The album moves like a single passage through loss. Its language is Arabic, and its tone is exhaustion. Across ten songs, UZU return to the same ideas again and again: distance, memory, isolation, and the futility of escape.
Each song moves steadily, and the tension comes from precision rather than volume or aggression. The guitars are bleak and melodic, and the rhythm section stays locked, never giving way to release. The sound recalls 1986 Polish classic Nowa Aleksandria by Siekiera, though without its cold romanticism. UZU sound more intense and more ascetic, and the clarity of the mix gives every Arabic word its own gravity.
The visual presentation mirrors this restraint. The insert prints the lyrics in Arabic and English alongside an image of two hands breaking a rifle in half. It references Crass and their peace-punk imagery, but stripped of any utopian idealism. It suits the record’s world, where liberation is not a slogan or a hope but a quiet act of defiance against suffocation.
"À qui la liberté?" does not search for transcendence. It lingers in the space where nothing moves and nothing heals. UZU offer no escape, only endurance, the quiet rhythm of breath held and released inside the ruins.