Without further ado, we’re excited to reveal for the first time the name, artwork and track list for our upcoming sophomore album. The album is titled Survivor, which is also the name of a song on the new record.

So why Survivor?

Survival is a core theme that runs through the album, weaving together all of its individual songs. In the words of our singer and lyricist Michelle Mondesir, the album captures “the ebb and flow” of the good days and the bad days that we all experience, adding, “we’re all just trying to survive the obstacles that life throws at us.” As a result, the album is very relatable. In fact, listening to the album front to back is like therapy or a journey, according to Michelle. “There is a song for everyone that speaks to the human condition, whether it is life’s highs or its lows.”

The band will be performing Survivor in its entirety at the album release show at The Hideout on Friday, September 20th. If you haven’t done so already, remember to purchase your tickets in advance to save money:

Survivor features 11 new tracks written and recorded over the past two years, including singles “Just Wanna Be Myself“, “Crashing Down“, “Kapow“, and of course a few unannounced future singles. No spoilers here 😉 The album artwork, which you see below, was created by our guitar player, Bret McCaffrey. It further cements the idea of survival by highlighting the sharp, and potentially rough and rigid moments that we all encounter. What inspired Bret? Scroll down to learn more.

Bret explains his inspiration and process further: “The inspiration for the album cover art came from the song ‘Crashing Down.’ Lyrically, this song is one of my favourites and I especially like the imagery evoked by the line “sharp and jagged metals”. For some time I thought this might even be a good album title. In any case, my original idea was to paint a mosaic-like image using metallic coloured paint, with each individual tesseract resembling sharp, jagged metal.

Unfortunately, my first attempt at creating this vision resulted in something that looked more like a flagstone walkway rather than a bad ass mosaic, so I decided to go back to the drawing board. As a second attempt, I moved away from the idea of creating a mosaic and played around with some patterns using different shapes and styles. After a few more failed efforts, I was slightly stumped on what to try next, until one morning when I was lying in bed staring at my ceiling and noticed the circular speaker pattern on the condo intercom. Feeling somewhat inspired, I took a painted diamond shape created from a previous failed attempt and arranged it in the same pattern as the intercom speaker and really liked the results.

From there, it was a matter of revisiting my original concept. I had checked the box on sharp and jagged, but had lost some aspect of metallics. As a final step, I took a photo of crumpled tin foil and tried that as the background, and voila, after several months of failure I felt like I had finally realized my OG vision.”

Track list:

Album credits:

• Lyrics by Michelle Mondesir
• Music by Michelle Mondesir (vocals, keys), Bret McCaffrey (guitar), Jaina Tharakan (drums, backing vocals), Giovanni Paola (bass), René Ip (guitar)
• Recorded by Alex Gamble (sound engineer) and Jack Marko (assistant sound engineer) at Union Sound Company in Toronto, Canada
• Mixed by Alex Gamble
• Mastered by LANDR
• Distributed by LANDR
• Album artwork by Bret McCaffrey