Montréal-based art punk quintet La Sécurité features a collection of acclaimed local players, with the band featuring current and past members of Choses Sauvages, Laurence-Anne, Silver Dapple, DATES, Pressure Pin, and others. Since their formation last year, the Canadian quintet have quickly developed and cemented their sound and approach: Meandering around the fringes of punk, New Wave and krautrock, the quintet’s take on art punk pairs jumpy beats, off-kilter arrangements and minimalistic yet melodic hooks, run through an insomniac filter. And while their music is razor sharp and danceable, their lyrical content is rooted in the feminist community-centric ethos of the Riot Grrrl movement. “It’s not just fun and games… it also bites. It’s catchy earworms delivered with a punk attitude,” guitarist Melissa Di Menna says.
In a relatively short period of time, La Securité has quickly made a name for themselves in both the national and international scene: They’ve been invited to play at SXSW, FME, Phoque Off, Taverne Tour and DISTORSION Psych Fest, and they’ve shared stages with Automatic, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, TVOD, Margaritas Podridas, CIVIC, and Duchess Says. Building upon a growing profile, the French Canadian quintet’s highly-anticipated Samuel Gemme-produced full-length debut, Stay Safe! is slated for a Friday release through Mothland.
Recorded at Gamma Recording Studio, Stay Safe! reportedly features songs that are manic yet surprisingly laid-back, empowering and urgent, reflective yet melancholy — all while mischievously flouting stylistic form every chance they can get.
In the lead-up to the rising Canadian outfit’s highly-anticipated fully-length debut, I’ve managed to write about two singles:
- “Anyway,” a scorcher built around buzzing and slashing power chords, a chugging motorik groove, bombastic hooks and choruses paired with a cooler-than-you swagger. But underneath the frenetic energy is a song informed by a deeply personal yet universal and super heavy subject: “This song was written in the early stages of dealing with grief related to miscarriage and pleads a sort of surrender to the strain it can put on a couple processing it,” La Securité’s vocalist Éliane Viens-Synnott explains in press notes.
- “Serpent,” a track that sees the Montréal-based post punk outfit quickly locking into the sort of dance punk groove that brings Echoes-era The Rapture and early LCD Soundsystem to mind paired with insistent shaker-driven percussion, twinkling keys, the collective’s unerring knack for dance floor friendly hooks and choruses and lyrics — in French — describing friend group drama. The song is a cheeky and sarcastic ode to complicated friendships that despite the language is very familiar. As the band puts it, “The person it is directed towards loves dancing. It’s a pretty dancy song. We hope they dance to it.”
Stay Safe‘s third and latest single “Hot Topic” is built around a lurching yet dance floor friendly, DEVO-like grove paired with slashing bursts of guitar, twinkling bursts of keys and off-kilter percussion paired with Viens-Synnott’s defiant yet wry, shouted vocals — presumably at a clueless cis-het dude, who can’t quite get the hint.
The song’s arrangement was initially written to score an extended avant-garde dance piece also titled “Hot Topic,” choreographed by the band’s Viens-Synnott and shot in a single, continuous take. “The concept was to choreograph a dance piece to be shot as a sequence to capture the ephemeral elements present in performing arts,” Viens-Synnott explains in press notes. “Drawing influences from the Riot Grrrl movement, I created a dance piece where five women take up all the space on a dancefloor, unapologetically. We can dress how we want, enjoy our night out however that looks for us and we don’t care what you think.”
After completing the piece, the band edited down the song into the version that ultimately appears on their soon-to-be released debut. And the accompanying video is also, an abridged version of the original dance piece. (For this post, the music video is above the main text of this post, the short film is below the main text. Both are a trippy experience.) The song, the short film and the video are a testament to the Montréal-based band’s unique nature as a collaborative, artistically open group with varied and differing creative ambitions and entanglements — and in a fashion seemingly similar to that of JOVM mainstays La Femme.