Konrad Kinard's 'War Is Family' Is a Cold War Memoir You Can’t Tune Out

Texas-born composer and performance artist Konrad Kinard has always treated memory as something unstable and combustible, but War Is Family feels like the first time he’s willing to let it detonate completely. Framed as “a radio drama without the drama or the radio,” the 20-track album plays less like a concept record than a psychological artifact—an experimental memoir shaped by Cold War paranoia, American mythmaking, and the slow seep of inherited fear. Produced by Fredrik Kinbom in Berlin, with contributions from BJ Cole’s wounded pedal steel, a small orchestra of cellists, drummer Chris Farr, and members of Kinard’s own family, the record collapses sound collage, narration, and song into something queasy and intimate. It’s not nostalgic; it’s forensic, examining how a nation’s anxieties lodge themselves in a child’s body and never quite leave.

The opening stretch establishes Kinard’s method with unnerving patience. “Born a Texan” floats on environmental hiss—beeps, water drips, crickets—while Kinard calmly recounts Sputnik’s shadow and his father’s fear that “the Russians were at our door.” It’s less a story than a transmission breaking through static. “Siddhartha Goes to Alabama” follows without warning, its brooding plucked guitar carrying Kinard’s gravel-throated narration into the back seat of a ’68 Oldsmobile rolling through the Deep South. Cotton fields, Confederate specters, and televised American righteousness blur into a single oppressive heat haze. The tension comes from contrast: the serenity of the delivery versus the creeping realization that the America on screen and the America outside the window are irreconcilable.

The album’s emotional center arrives with the title track, where dark piano and writhing strings frame a vocal performance that sounds scraped raw. When Kinard repeats “War is family,” it lands with Orwellian chill, a thesis statement disguised as confession. From there, War Is Family grows increasingly corrosive: “Love Orgy Hot” mangles childhood innocence into dread with churning guitars and a child’s recitation of a puritan wartime prayer, turning quiet into apocalypse. By the time “A Texas Summer Night” closes the record, the effect is cumulative and disorienting—you don’t just hear Kinard’s memories, you inhabit them. The most unsettling part is the recognition that some of them might be yours, too.