let off steam

In between the stops and restarts, they both wittily let off steam about the absurdity of the process.

She realized she needed to let off steam in a way she rarely does.

There were corrugated aluminum chutes down the mountainside to channel water, and I joked that they were water slides for predators to let off steam between kills.

A tightly constrained opposition and occasional street protests were long seen as an important pressure valve for the Kremlin, through which its frustrated subjects could let off steam.

White people knew that they had the ability to let off steam by lynching a man, woman or child who was Black simply for sassing a white woman, reckless eyeballing, basically looking at a white person in a way they didn't like.