Tag: Sunglaciers Foreign Bodies

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunglaciers Return with Shimmering “Only Love”

With the release of 2019’s Foreign Bodies, 2022’s Subterranea and 2024’s Regular Nature, Calgary-based JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers — founding duo Evan Resnik (vocals, guitar, synths, piano, sampling) and Mathieu Blanchard (drums, percussion, production) along with Nyssa Brown (vocals, guitar) and Kyle Crough (bass) — have firmly cemented a sound that blurs the boundaries between polished melodicism and opaque experimentation, auspicious romanticism and unbridled descent. Though anchored in the strange realties of our time, their sons are laced with a certain optimism through well-placed and well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms. 

The Calgary-based outfit’s highly-anticipated fourth album, Spiritual Content is slated for a March 27, 2026 release through Mothland. The album reportedly sees the band further exploring the chiaroscuro depths of post-punk while simultaneously setting out to redefine their sound. Thematically, the album explores modern day life through allegorical songwriting, elevated by genuinely catchy melodies, resolute arrangements and stylish production.

Over the course of its breakneck 35-minute run, the album’s indie rock-meets-post-punk-tinged, nine songs reportedly captured fleeting yet endearing moments in time, their narrative bent, twisted and distorted into expansive and highly evocative soundscapes. The album is meant to layout like a psychedelic sequence where grooves dance and wiggle in and out, awaking feelings of wonder and awe, while also trigging emotions like bewilderment, fear and alienation. 

The album sees Resnik and Blanchard turning to their bandmates Brown and Brougham along with acclaimed producer and multi-instrumentalist Chad VanGaalen (synths, vibraphone, electric piano and additional production) to flesh out the album’s material. The band also continued their collaborations with mixing/mastering engineer Mark Lawson and former Besnard Lakes‘ Richard White, who took on vinyl mastering duties. 

Spiritual Content will include the Freedom of Choice-era Devo-inspired “Eye to Eye” and the album’s latest single “Only Love.” Seemingly channeling a synthesis of Heaven Up Here-era Echo and the Bunnymen, early The Cure and Gang of Four, “Only Love” sees Resnik, Blanchard and company musing on the transformative and redemptive power of love — but it’s underpinned with the subtly bitter reality that nothing is forever, not even love.

Directed by Ethan Clark, the accompanying video features the band’s members at a packed house party but love — whether of someone else or self-love made the video’s protagonist change his life, perhaps for the better. We see this through a series of woozy flash backs and flash forwards, sometimes within the same scene.

“Only love can upend your lifestyle, change your patterns. You’re young, you’re out at parties all the time,” the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays explain. “Then something happens. Years pass in an instant. Maybe you found love, or self-love, or something else. Got healthy. Got busy. Where you used to go out, now you stay in. The party’s not over; it rages on in your memories. This video is kind of an illustration of those memories.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunglaciers Share Punchy and Breakneck “Eye to Eye”

With the release of 2019’s Foreign Bodies, 2022’s Subterranea and 2024’s Regular Nature, Calgary-based JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers — founding duo Evan Resnik (vocals, guitar, synths, piano, sampling) and Mathieu Blanchard (drums, percussion, production) along with Nyssa Brown (vocals, guitar) and Kyle Crough (bass) — have firmly cemented a sound that blurs the boundaries between polished melodicism and opaque experimentation, auspicious romanticism and unbridled descent. Though anchored in the strange realties of our time, their sons are laced with a certain optimism through well-placed and well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms.

The Calgary-based outfit’s highly-anticipated fourth album, Spiritual Content is slated for a March 27, 2026 release through Mothland. The album reportedly sees the band further exploring the chiaroscuro depths of post-punk while simultaneously setting out to redefine their sound. Thematically, the album explores modern day life through allegorical songwriting, elevated by genuinely catchy melodies, resolute arrangements and stylish production.

Over the course of its breakneck 35-minute run, the album’s indie rock-meets-post-punk-tinged, nine songs reportedly captured fleeting yet endearing moments in time, their narrative bent, twisted and distorted into expansive and highly evocative soundscapes. The album is meant to layout like a psychedelic sequence where grooves dance and wiggle in and out, awaking feelings of wonder and awe, while also trigging emotions like bewilderment, fear and alienation.

The album sees Resnik and Blanchard turning to their bandmates Brown and Brougham along with acclaimed producer and multi-instrumentalist Chad VanGaalen (synths, vibraphone, electric piano and additional production) to flesh out the album’s material. The band also continued their collaborations with mixing/mastering engineer Mark Lawson and former Besnard Lakes‘ Richard White, who took on vinyl mastering duties.

Spiritual Content‘s first single “Eye to Eye” is a Freedom of Choice-era Devo-inspired motorik ripper featuring woozy synths, skittering and booming drums, squiggling guitars paired with Resnik’s punchy, almost California punk rock-like delivery before shifting into a towering cacophonous storm of feedback and a gentle, seemingly exhausted fade out.

“The song is about how we all have more in common with each other than we think, and how the small differences between us have been magnified to stoke division through social media and media in general,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik explains. “I used a lot of old footage/movies/propaganda to showcase both our creative and destructive capabilities. There’s a lot of sped up footage, reversed sequences, and pretty flower timelapses. Sometimes it feels like we’re racing to our inevitable demise; we have to slow down and take a step back. There’s still time to recover and progress together, but it’s getting a bit late in the game, you know?”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Sunglaciers Share Woozy and Aching “Cursed”

Calgary-based post-punk/psych pop outfit and JOVM mainstays Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a collaboration between its founding members —  multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik.

The band’s full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies saw them crafting a maximalist approach that blurred the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy post-punk experimentalism. The Calgary-based JOVM mainstays support the album with tours with the likes of fellow JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano. Adding to a growing profile both regionally and nationally, their material topped the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada.

When the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music in the early months of 2020. Those writing sessions birthed the material on their sophomore album, 2022’s Chad Van Gaalen co-produced Subterranea.

Subterranea saw the JOVM mainstays eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result was a frenetic, breakneck paced album of material that managed to never overstay its welcome. “The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik said. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”

Regular Nature, the Calgary-based JOVM mainstays highly-anticipated third album is slated for a March 29, 2024 release through Montréal-based label Mothland. While continuing to blur the boundaries between polished melodcism and opaque experimentation, the material sees the band blurring auspicious Romanticism and unbridled dissent. Through firmly anchored in the strange and uneasy reality of our time, the album’s songs are laced with a certain optimism through well-calculated psych elements and vibrant rhythms, creating a unique strand of kaleidoscopic pop.

Continuing their ongoing collaboration with co-producer Chad Van Gaalen, Regular Nature was purposely designed to be enjoyed in many ways, from solitary headphone listening to a crowded live venue while seemingly nodding to Deerhunter, Ought, MGMT, DEVO, Talking Heads and others. The album also features a guest spot from acclaimed Zoon creative mastermind Daniel Monkman.

“We wanted to make a concise yet explosive record, continuing to find the balance between familiar and novel sounds and approaches. We have not and may never make ‘dance music,’ but we make continued efforts to bring sounds that we like from dance and electronic genres into our own, delighting in the process as much as the product,” the band explains. “We love to play and experiment, defying expectations and discovering new sounds. This record shows how these novel (to us) elements interact with the rock and roll world we comfortably inhabit.

We want to make you dance. We want to make you think. We want to make you think while you’re dancing and dance while you’re busy thinking. This is an album for the body, brain and heart. It’s compassionate, frustrated, communal and dreadful. In a world of information overload, where everything comes at you at once, Regular Nature is trying to normalize the phenomenon. This is chaotic music for a chaotic world, a three-way conversation between outer self, the subconscious and the mad world. As expressed on penultimate track ‘One Time or Another:’ ‘There’s always somebody talking.’

Regular Nature‘s first single, the woozy, dream pop-meets-psych pop-meets-post-punk-like “Cursed” features glistening and fluttering synth arpeggios, a motorik rhythm section, an Avalon-era Roxy Music-like guitar solo and hazy and yearning vocals. The achingly nostalgic song sees its narrator discussing a love passing them by with a weary and bitterly resigned sense of regret. “Oh, if I had only known what I know now,” the song’s narrator seems to say.

“‘Cursed’ is quite probably Sunglaciers’ biggest downer to date. It is a piece about shattered, unsaid expectations, and reflecting on the reality of a situation after it has passed, and all that remains is its memory,” the band explains. “It is a slow dance between regret and acceptance, a song about lost love and lost potential. It is being caught in a moment, blinded by short-term desires, only to wake up on the other side when everything has passed and it is too late to reconcile (“You wish your head could unremember this/ But memory is all there ever is”).

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik, the accompanying video for “Cursed” is a gorgeous, hypnotic and nostalgia-fueled fever dream that makes the familiar — dusty, countryside roads, mountaintop vistas and more — seem surreal and otherworldly. And at its core is a sense of time passing by: The familiar growing smaller in the rearview, the mistakes and regrets looming larger with an unfamiliar and uncertain future in front of you.

“We spent a lot of time in the van this past year. On the tour where I captured the bulk of this footage, we drove over 15,000km in 6 weeks. There was a lot of time quietly spent looking out the window at these amazing landscapes flying by,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik explains. “All I had was my phone, but I had recently upgraded to a new-ish one with a great (to me) camera. I had a lot of time on my hands to play with perspective, and loved seeing these vistas in black and white. I was intrigued by the disorientation I felt when viewing rock formations upside down, and how something could look familiar and concrete, but also alien and abstract at the same time. That’s a feeling I wanted to explore in conjunction with our song ‘Cursed,’ which deals with regret, feelings of ‘what if?,’ and the nature of dream vs imagination vs reality. By the time we got home, I had a lot of nice footage to play with. Denice provided a wonderfully easy and interesting subject through which I could tease out a narrative arc of someone wandering alone through a melange of waking, dream, and memory.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Calgary’s Sunglaciers Share Brooding and Uneasy “Best Years”

Calgary-based post-punk outfit Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a caollaboration between its founding — and core — members: multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik. When they started the project, Blanchard had completed his studies in medicine, working in family medicine and addiction and Resnik had returned from a trip hitchhiking through France.

Since the project’s formation, the Calgary-based act has released a couple of EPs and their full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies. Foreign Bodies saw the Canadian post-punk outfit saw them crafting a maximalist approach that saw them blurring the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy, post-punk experimentation.

During that same period, the duo have seen a steadily rising profile: They’ve shared stages with the likes of JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano while topping the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada.

When the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band quickly shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music during the early months of 2020. Those writing sessions wound up becoming their sophomore album Subterranea, which Montreal-based purveyors of all things psych and trippy, Mothland released today.

Continuing an ongoing collaboration with Chad VanGaalen, who co-produced the album, Subterranea  sees the band eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result is a frenetic, breakneck album of material that never overstays its welcome. “We tried to write vertically instead of horizontally,” Sunglaciers’ Matthieu Blanchard explains. “Our last album Foreign Bodies and the EPs that came before it had lots of long songs with different parts drifting back and forth. For this album, we decided to strip our songs down to two or three minutes with only a few ideas in each of them.”

“The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik says. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”

With an extended timeframe to write and record, the album, which was recorded at Bruce Crews’ voiceover studio On Air Studios allowed Blanchard and Blanchard the opportunity to learn engineering skills and for the opportunity to experiment with swapping the instruments that each member typically played, a strategy that was employed during the writing and recording of Portishead‘s Third and David Bowie‘s “Boys Keep Swinging.”

The album also features contributions from the aforementioned Chad VanGaalen, Hermitess‘ Jennifer Crighton and Roman66′s Louis Cza The Black Greek God. The end result may arguably be Sunglaciers most urgent and cohesive batch of material, an effort that draws from the likes of Deerhunter, Total Control, and BEAK> among others.

In the lead up to the album’s release today, I wrote about two of Subterranea‘s singles:

  • “Avoidance,” a woozy and uneasy ripper full of guilt and recriminations delivered with a breakneck freneticism centered around a persistent synth-driven groove. And while sounding a bit like Plague Vendor and Atsuko Chiba, “Avoidance” lyrically touches upon themes of alienation, abandonment and guilt in a way that should feel familiar to most of us during this unusual moment of our lives. 
  • “Out of My Skull,” another breakneck track full of foreboding, uneasy menace centered around hypnotic, glistening synth arpeggios, a sinuous bass line and propulsive drumming paired with Resnik’s anxious delivery. And as a result, the song evokes a frustrated, restless boredom — and it should feel familiar for most of us, stuck at home with nothing to do, nowhere to really go and no one to see. 

“Best Years,” Subterranea‘s latest single features a guest spot from the aforementioned Chad VanGaalen and may be the dreamiest, most Wolf Parade-like song on the entire album with the song featuring wobbling synth arpeggios, a slow-burning grinding groove, glistening guitars and Resik’s plaintive vocals. But underneath, the seemingly placid surface is a gnawing and uneasy dissatisfaction.

“The song is about getting stuck in what comforts you and losing years inside passive contentment,” the band’s Evan Resnik explains. “Time passes, you realize all those plans you had for yourself have charred on the back burner or disappeared completely. You thought you were happy, but it was just the safety of your situation, a relationship or a decent job, that made you feel this way. Suddenly the world is dull and you feel like your time is up. I’m very afraid of that feeling and these days I try my best to avoid it.

The video was made by Calgary-based multimedia artist Ryan Kostel. He reworked old film footage and ran it through different media (weird lenses, old TVs, VCRs, etc.) to create a visual story for the song.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Calgary’s Sunglaciers Release A Feverish Visual for Breakneck Ripper “Avoidance”

Calgary-based post-punk outfit Sunglaciers can trace its origins back to 2017 as a collaboration between its founding — and core — members: multi-instrumentalist Matthieu Blanchard and lead vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Evan Resnik. When they started the project, Blanchard had completed his studies in medicine, working in family medicine and addition and Resnik had returned from a trip hitchhiking through France. Since the project’s formation, the Calgary-based act has released a couple of EPs and their full-length debut, 2019’s Foreign Bodies, which saw them crafting a sound that blurred the lines between dazzling indie rock melodicism and icy, post-punk experimentation, centered around a maximalist approach.

During that same five year period, the members of the Canadian post-punk outfit have seen a steadily rising profile, as they’ve shared stages with the likes of JOVM mainstays Preoccupations, Omni and Daniel Romano while topping the charts of college radio stations across Western Canada. Understandably, when the pandemic put their touring plans on a then-indefinite pause, the band quickly shifted their focus to writing material, dedicating 40-plus hour weeks to music during the early months of 2020.

Those writing sessions wound up becoming the Calgary-based outfit’s sophomore album Subterranea, slated for a March 25, 2022 release through Montreal-based psychedelic purveyors Mothland. Continuing an ongoing collaboration with Chad VanGaalen, who co-produced the album, Subterranea reportedly sees the band eschewing the maximalist approach of their previous releases and crafting material with a decided laser focus. The end result is a frenetic, breakneck album of material with songs that never overstay their welcome. “We tried to write vertically instead of horizontally,” Sunglaciers’ Matthieu Blanchard explains. “Our last album Foreign Bodies and the EPs that came before it had lots of long songs with different parts drifting back and forth. For this album, we decided to strip our songs down to two or three minutes with only a few ideas in each of them.”

“The bulk of this album came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik says. “I was out of work and Mathieu was working half as much as usual, so we had lots of time on our hands. We flipped a switch and started playing music everyday. It’s a good indicator of how we were writing at the time while we wrapped our heads around some new gear and saw what came out of it. Essentially, we took all of our favourite musical tendencies and put them together. We were listening to a lot of McCartney II at the time and loved how eclectic it was, which led to us mirroring that vibe.”

With an extended timeframe to write and record, the album, which was recorded at Bruce Crews’ voiceover studio On Air Studios allowed the members the opportunity to learn skills in engineering and for the opportunity to swap the instruments that each member typically played, a strategy that was employed during the writing and recording of Portishead‘s Third and David Bowie‘s “Boys Keep Swinging.” The album also features contributions from the aforementioned Chad VanGaalen, Hermitess‘ Jennifer Crighton and Roman66′s Louis Cza The Black Greek God. The end result may arguably be Sunglaciers most urgent and cohesive batch of material, an effort that draws from the likes of Deerhunter, Total Control, and BEAK> among others,.

Subterranea‘s latest single is “Avoidance,” a woozy and uneasy ripper full of guilt and recrimination delivered with a breakneck freneticism and featuring a nagging and persistent synth line-driven groove, angular guitar attack, driving four-on-the-four, dryly delivered vocals and screams by Louis Cza. Sounding a bit like JOVM mainstays Plague Vendor and Atsuko Chiba, “Avoidance” lyrically touches upon themes of alienation, abandonment and guilt in a way that should feel familiar to most of us during this unusual moment of our lives.

Directed by the band’s Evan Resnik and Ryan Kostel, the video is a paranoid and uneasy fever dream in which the video’s protagonist is tormented by figures that he thinks are his friends — but prove to be in his own head.

“The video depicts a nightmare scenario with the protagonist in a panic as he is tormented by figures he thought were his friends, ultimately coming face-to-face with himself,” Sunglaciers’ Evan Resnik explains. “The fogged-out rooms, varied lighting, and overlaid shots pull the viewer inside this dreamscape and accentuate the anxiety and trepidation we explore in the song.”

“When filming ‘Avoidance’ I really wanted to mimic the anxious, unsettled mind,” Ryan Kostel adds. “Constantly shifting angles, I used long fluid shots and shifts in time to create an unbalanced sensation. Rapid fluctuations of light and color layered over kinetic and sometimes violent imagery help to convey the subject’s mental unease.”