That you have to put parentheses around expressions does not make the syntax go away in Lisp. The 'has almost no syntax' is mostly a misconception. Syntax in Lisp is provided by special operators (LET, ...) and macros (DEFUN, ...).

Often people assume the relatively simple syntax for s-expressions is the syntax of the programming language Lisp. It isn't. Lisp syntax is defined on top of s-expression.