Shapes by The Grasping Straws

The Grasping Straws are done playing by the rules. On Shapes, their latest album, the experimental rock outfit push their sound into new territory, blending alt-rock, jazz, and psychedelia with themes of nature, technology, and the messy business of being human in a digital world.

It’s a sharp pivot from their last release, Patterns, which explored emotional entrapment and the cycles we get stuck in. Shapes takes a step back and asks bigger questions: What happens when we disconnect from those loops? Can we rebuild meaning from scratch?

The result is a bold, genre-fluid project that feels just as spiritual as it is technical. Written during a deep dive into software engineering, the album is laced with nods to coding, systems, and digital logic, but used as a lens to explore real emotional stakes. Tracks like ‘Robots’ unpack the numbness of life online, while ‘Fingers’ and ‘Water It’ bring things back to the body and the earth.

With Gordon Raphael (The Strokes, Regina Spektor) on production and a standout mix of raw violins, distorted guitars, and layered vocals, Shapes has the feel of something carefully unravelled: intimate but unpredictable, glitchy and grounded.

On the album, The Grasping Straws say: “Shapes are the ethereal building blocks of language, emotion, understanding, and communication. The album celebrates nature, oneness, and wildlife preservation, against a backdrop of technologically-driven consumerism. When we abstract away our arbitrarily assigned meanings, we can connect as pure lines, forms, colours, sounds, and overlapping shapes.”