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As the pandemic destroyed many planned objectives of bands across the world, the two masterminds behind Calgary’s indie post-punks Sunglaciers, Evan Resnik and Mathieu Blanchard, found themselves in a strange but happy dream—having access to a bunch of amazing gear (used by huge names in the music world like Elton John) and able to write music every day.
During the heart of Canada’s lockdown, in a commercial voiceover studio, Evan and Mathieu wrote and recorded a bunch of songs that would make up their upcoming sophomore album, Subterranea, co-produced by their hometown hero Chad VanGaalen and mixed by acclaimed engineer Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire, Yves Jarvis, The Unicorns).
Subterrenea is due sometime in 2022 out via Mothland, but the single “Draw Me In,” a psychedelic downer dance beat in the same vein as MGMT, dropped a week ago, paired with a trippy visualizer created by Anthony Lucero, using machine learning techniques.
Sunglaciers have been going nowhere but up since forming in 2017, steadily growing in popularity and sharing stages with acts such as Omni, Preoccupations, and Daniel Romano, while topping the charts of campus radio stations in Western Canada.
Sunglaciers are playing a show with Motorists and Split Layer on Oct. 22 at l’Hemisphere Gauche and have another appearance during Mothland’s showcase during M For Montreal in November.
PAN M 360 had time to chat with Evan and Mathie, as they basked in picturesque Toronto sunrays (fitting for a band called Sunglaciers), right after they got back from their tour in the United Kingdom.
PAN M 360: You just got back into Canada today right? How was the tour?
Evan Resnik: We flew into Toronto yesterday around 4-ish and got to where we’re staying at like six or seven, and kind of crashed early. Today we’re enjoying a little chill day. The tour was amazing. It was really, really, fun. The promoters were all really great, crowds excellent and so enthusiastic and really supportive and pretty much every show just got better and better. It kind of came and went in a flash and I’m feeling really good about it.
PAN M 360: But it was originally planned for Europe as well, right?
Mathieu Blanchard: Yeah, we had a two-week EU component as well back at the start of 2020. But obviously with all the all the COVID recoveries being different in every country, we we just decided to keep it to the UK this time.
PAN M 360: I hear they treat you really well when you tour in the U.K.
Mathieu Blanchard: I just made a post this morning about how well the promoters treated us, like literally two hours ago (laughs). Yeah, every promoter was honestly, like Evan just said, I think better than the last, or they were just all …
Evan Resnik: They just really prioritized our comfortability, so it was a great experience.
PAN M 360: And you probably only got like trickles of it, but I what’s the U.K. scene like? Canada is so small in comparison.
Mathieu Blanchard: What was crazy was neither the promoters nor the bands really knew other bands at their same level in other cities that were just like an hour or two away. The crew we hung out with that were great and the bands were so good. There was this one band, Rongorongo, that was so sick, and they didn’t know any bands from like Newcastle, where we were just the day before, which is just like two, three hours away. Like Manchester and Liverpool were half an hour away and nobody knew of anyone. And we thought that was weird because of what you just said in Canada. After you’ve been playing for five, six years or whatever, you kind of know people from all across the country, right?
Evan Resnik: Yeah, I think it’s because a three-hour drive is considered so ridiculously long and unacceptable (laughs). A lot of the bands hadn’t toured much outside of their immediate proximity.
PAN M 360: That makes sense. So our readers don’t really know your origin story so how did you guys form?
Mathieu Blanchard: So Chris Dadge [musician from Calgary in a number of projects] is the one who kind of linked us up in 2017. I was playing with a couple of bands, Catholic Girls and Crystal Eyes, and then I stopped playing with those bands, and Evan was looking for a drummer. He was getting Dadge to drum on the EP and I was looking for a drummer for the band, and so I joined up and then we started writing songs for the next couple of EPs. After that we started writing the songs for the full-length Foreign Bodies that we put out a couple years ago. Then we got Kyle from DRI HIEV on bass and Nyssa who is from Hag Face and a bunch of other cool projects, and yeah, we just got to write a shit-ton during COVID for the follow-up LP coming out.
PAN M 360: And most bands and artists didn’t really get that opportunity to jam during the lockdowns.
Mathieu Blanchard: Well, it was just Evan and I in the same cohort. We had just gotten the studio maybe like a month before COVID and we were supposed to get another jam room and people literally got kicked out the day we were moving in. They got evicted, the band Napalmpom. The room had been there for like 15 years. I moved to Calgary in 2012 and always wanted a room there forever and finally, the day were supposed to start jamming for the first time, the restaurant upstairs got it cancelled cause of COVID.
Evan Resnik: From there, one of our friends is a part-owner of a commercial voiceover studio and we had always thought about doing like no-trace jamming there, and the studio was into it for a bit of extra cash.
Mathieu Blanchard: We got like two or three jams in with Nyssa and then COVID happened.
Evan Resnik: So all of a sudden we had access to all of their gear and nobody from the studio was coming into work during that first lockdown, which was really intense.
Mathieu Blanchard: So Evan and I were just always hanging out and constantly writing songs and jamming non-stop. When we would go outside it was so fucking quiet and just bizarre. That studio was so sick. It does like WestJet on-hold calls…
Evan Resnik: Or like auto parts call directories for air filters, and it’s all on tape still.
PAN M 360: That’s crazy that they’re still using tape.
Mathieu Blanchard: (laughs) It is! It’s like the hospitals still using pagers. So the other co-owner is just this old guy who has been in studios for years and he’s rented gear to like Elton John, and the mics for the first Chili Peppers record are all his. So this guy has a ton of gear and once he got more comfortable with us, we had access to all of it, so we just started recording everything.
PAN M 360: And some of those recordings became songs on your upcoming LP Subterranea?
Mathieu Blanchard: Yeah, exactly.
PAN M 360: And after a first listen, it kind of seems like you guys leaned more into the synths on this one more than on Foreign Bodies?
Evan Resnik: I think we both have loved synths for a long time and just wanted to kind of get out of our comfort zones a bit, from a writing perspective. So we just did a lot of jamming on synths and drum machines and stuff, seeing which ways our brains would take us if we didn’t have guitars and drum sticks in hand.
Mathieu Blanchard: We had talked about what we wanted to do after we wrote the first record and we decided we wanted to try and write songs differently. Instead of Evan on the guitar and me being on drums, we would not use either of those instruments to write songs and would just pick up whatever. So we kind of made it a mission to not write songs with the guitar. And there’s still songs that were written on guitar or transposed from synth to guitar, but it was to just to get a different vibe. Portishead had done that for Third and I’m sure tons of bands have done that for more inspiration and creativity.
Evan Resnik: And then for the next record we got Chad VanGaalen to add a bunch of other cool shit on top of what we had already done.
PAN M 360: Like for the latest single, “Draw Me In”? It’s more indie pop, but lyrically bleak as hell.
Evan Resnik: (laughs) That’s the semi-charmed life approach to songwriting.
Mathieu Blanchard: (laughs) It’s the line we want to be towing for sure. But the indie pop vibe was all Chad, who added that very cool synth with some extra drums. And he really made it just better.
Evan Resnik: And quickly too, as if it was so easy.
Mathieu Blanchard: Yeah. It was humbling working with people who were kind of at a much different level than us.
PAN M 360: And do you guys write lyrics together?
Evan Resnik: So I sing the vocals but I will often come to Matt with a bunch of ideas and a bunch of raw stuff and we’ll flesh it out together. I think as time goes on we’re becoming more and more just like equal parts and just kind of kind of both approaching it together.
PAN M 360: And I kind of get the sense that some of the lyrics are really stream of consciousness?
Evan Resnik: Yeah, it can be kind of like stream-of-consciousness rambling, like from me or we really simplify it, just focus on a few words that have maybe either vague or kind of universal meaning and are accessible from different points. Personally, I love interpreting songs. I love the fact that the way I interpret a song is almost certainly different from the intention of the songwriter.
Mathieu Blanchard: Evan’s thing is that he has a million ideas, you can probably see that from Foreign Bodies. And the lyrics initially are the same so it’s really just pairing it down a finding a specific theme.
PAN M 360: And so how do these songs translate live? It sounds like there’s lots of room to experiment?
Mathieu Blanchard: It’s been really fun. We just expanded the setup and got a drum machine, essentially a sampling pad that is up front that sometimes I use, sometimes Evan uses, sometimes Nyssa uses, and we added a synth as well. And Evan and Nyssa kind of nice rotate between those two.
PAN M 360: And so all of you guys are just switching instruments?
Evan Resnik: Yeah, even Kyle plays synth, so we’re all kind of flip-flopping, kind of like Sloan used to do. Like when I saw them in the late ’90s, they would just throw their guitars at each other. Maybe we’ll get there.
With Motorists and Split Layer at l’Hemisphere Gauche (221 Beaubien E.), Friday, Oct. 22, 8:30pm
