Between Living and Letting Go: Tethered Hands’ How We Live Is How We Die

Band : Tethered Hands

Album: How We Live Is How We Die

Released: 23 January 2026

Tethered Hands are more than a band. They are an evolving force of human connection and raw expression. What began as a singular vision has grown into a collective of five remarkable artists, scattered across the globe yet bound by the same pulse. Together, they reach out through the chaos of our modern world, offering something rare and transcendent. They create music that doesn’t just fill the air, but seeps into the soul, demanding it to be felt, inhaled, and remembered.

Their latest release How We Live Is How We Die is a deeply human meditation on loss, heartbreaking in its honesty, yet luminous in its hope. It invites us mere mortals to look directly into the face of death, not with fear, but with curiosity and good human grace. Joseph Phillips, alongside Daniel Rickards, Pascal Normand, Sam Wallis, and Joshua Cook, has crafted an experience that breathes, trembles, and aches with purpose. Together, they’ve created not just an album, but a passage we all must take, a sonic journey that follows the moment of passing into the afterlife, transforming dread into acceptance, and sorrow into something strangely beautiful. This is music that reminds us we are alive, even as it teaches us how to let go and face the inevitable.

With nine tracks to lose yourself in, How We Live Is How We Die is a story told entirely through sound. Its sonic landscape surges with raw power yet is threaded with moments of startling fragility, with melodies so delicate they ache long after they fade.

I Will Show You The Infinite Universe serves as the opening invocation, angelic in its arrival and profoundly uplifting in spirit. A piano-led introduction shimmers beneath a vast canopy of synths, its glow almost celestial, before the full weight of the band descends. Guitars crash with emotive force, drums thunder with purpose, and everything converges in a sweeping crescendo of post-rock purity, and already I’m feeling overwhelmed and deeply moved.  Following that, Embrace the Chaos unfolds as a monument of mastery and crushing gravity. The guitars cry and convulse, near-tremolo lines erupting in distortion, flinging sparks across an endless cosmos, just more glorious post-rock glory.

I Never Thought It Would End Like This introduces a delicate shift in tone, as synths scrape the heavens and violins weep with the weight of remembered lives, each moment blurring by at breakneck speed. One of the album’s quiet triumphs for me lies in its track titles, with none more evocative than The Wondrous Flow of Birth and Death. Here, hushed voices and serene textures cradle the listener in suspension, floating in pure nothingness. Slowly, the music gathers breath and momentum, every instrument feeding the ascent until a shimmering crescendo surge forward reverberating across the sky.

The album continues to float through a constellation of guitars, synths, and piano, each track introducing its own emotional current while preserving the journey’s calm, deliberate pace. This Is the End of the End aches with mournful piano, solemn and tender, its warmth and fluidity calling to mind the most beautiful moments of God Is an Astronaut, ultimately signaling the passing with a time of death called to utterly break you.

This carries us into the closing track, an epic post-rock classic in the making. Hold Tight These Hands, Tethered by Toil, for Each Day Could Be Our Last is nothing short of a masterclass. Lying still as it unfolds feels surreal and, at the same time, unflinchingly stark. At eighteen minutes, the piece breathes with immense scope, ebbing and flowing around a hypnotic, unforgettable melody guided by ebony and ivory keys. Even in its final moments, guitars cry and weep before gently falling into eternal sleep… only to stir once more in a hidden message that lifts you from your heavenly slumber, reminding you that you are still breathing, and that life still courses through your veins......so go make the most of it!

How We Live is How We Die | Tethered Hands