Autopoiet
Some Party is a newsletter sharing the latest in independent Canadian rock'n'roll, curated by Adam White. Each edition explores punk, garage, psych, and otherwise uncategorizable indie rock, drawing lines from proto to post and taking some weird diversions along the way.
Daniel Romano's Outfit"Autopoiet"
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Daniel Romano's ever-evolving garage unit The Outfit embarks on a new chapter with the 14-song Preservers of the Pearl, arriving March 13 through You've Changed Records. This marks the Welland collective's first full-length since 2022's Too Hot To Sleep and the first studio long player to capture their contemporary four-piece lineup. Today's Outfit finds Romano sharing writing duties with his brother (and fellow Attack In Black alum) Ian Romano and his spouse, celebrated Texan singer/songwriter Carson McHone. Tommy Major, namesake of the Sudbury punk heroes Tommy and the Commies, rounds out the core as a full-time member. The band's statement promises "music as communion — rock n roll as a shared experience," stressing a new era of intra-band collaboration. As The Outfit's long served as the direct continuation of Romano's prolific solo career, that's a notable shift in perspective. You've Changed boasts of "a new beginning and a homecoming — an album that feels discovered, not designed."
The band recorded live off the floor from their Camera Varda studio, with longtime de facto member Kenneth Roy Meehan engineering. Outside of the core quartet, the record's sole guest contribution comes from organist Mark Lalama, a familiar presence in Romano's catalogue. You can hear the first salvo from the record everywhere, with "Autopoiet" delivering a rousing power-pop anthem rife with the nostalgic romanticism that The Outfit's made their calling card. It's a line-in-the-sand mission statement of a song, no less intentful than 2020's "First Yoke" or the title track to 2017's Modern Pressure. The band performs it amidst a swirl of psych-pop colour in a video by Meehan. The group's predisposition for framing garage rock almost as a form of mysticism remains in full effect, and I'm not complaining.
The new record follows up on 2024's Too Hot To Sleep LP. This lineup of The Outfit first appeared on a pair of 2025 singles ("Even If It's Obscure" / "Sweet Dew Of The Kingdom" and "Servo" / "Dumb Love"), both available on 7" vinyl. The band's Live in Oslo LP, recorded in November of 2024, arrived last summer, as well.
MotoristsNever Sing Alone
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Toronto jangle-pop quartet Motorists return March 6 with Never Sing Alone, their third LP. The 11-song set arrives through Vancouver's We Are Time label.
The recently shared "Frogman" stems from a surreal happenstance on Vancouver Island, where frontperson Craig Fahner unexpectedly snagged a scuba diver with a fishing lure. The artist recalled the incident:
"After struggling to dislodge it for a few minutes, someone in a scuba suit emerged from the water with my stuck lure in hand. He swam up and handed it back to me, then went back into the water and disappeared. My dad remarked 'that Frogman saved you!' The incident, and my dad's exclamation, stuck in my head for months after."
From that encounter, the song's fantastical narrative took shape, told from the perspective of a person whose partner left them to live underwater. Fahner explored the song's themes:
"On another level, it's about the abruptness of loss, of looking into your empty hands wondering where the thing you were just holding went, and whether your life will be the same without it. Musically, we tried to find a similar melancholy aura, leaning into a lush and jaunty jangle-pop feeling which Chris Cohen's production really brought into its full sparkling glory."
The band road-tested Never Sing Alone's earlier single, "Cristobal," extensively on their 2024 tours. Fahner wrote it shortly after relocating from Toronto to New York, and the alienation inherent in the loss of the familiar permeates the track. He explained:
"I was reading about 'seasteading' - a concept beloved by weird tech bro billionaires, who aim to build their own autonomous territories as luxury tax havens separate from the rest of the world. The song is about not wanting to wake up in a world where the Earth is being used up to fuel a vision of the future that doesn't involve ordinary people. It's reflecting on various attempts to build a new society, and how those utopian ideas seem to forsake the idea of making the world we already live in more livable."
Motorists recorded with Jesse Turnbull (Dilly Dally, Losers) at Toronto's Taurus Recording, with follow-up sessions in Brooklyn and Gothenburg. Acclaimed songwriter Chris Cohen (Deerhoof, Captured Tracks) mixed the songs.
Motorists features Craig Fahner on guitar and vocals, Matt Learoyd on bass and vocals, Nick McKinlay on drums, and Moa-Linn Rosenlöf on guitar and vocals. Fahner and Learoyd have roots in several Calgarian punk and indie bands, notably Feel Alright, Leather Jacuzzi, and Lab Coast. The new record follows 2024's Touched by the Stuff.
The Fake FriendsLet's Not Overthink This
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Montreal post-punk sextet The Fake Friends previewed their debut LP Let's Not Overthink This with a pair of advance singles. The 11-track collection arrives February 13 through Stomp Records, showcasing a confident, hook-laden evolution of the band's sound.
The garage swagger of "A Sucker Born Every Minute" harkens back to the early 2000s. The song's chorus hits you like a truck. With a dramatic vocal switch-up and a crash of organ, it recalls memorable barnburners from Rocket from the Crypt and The Hives. "The Way She Goes" takes a different tack, weaving a tense new wave tune with one foot in angular Wire worship and the other in the goth theatricality of The Damned. Stomp's press release details that song:
"The track sits in the middle of the album's emotional arc, where confidence starts to fray at the edges. Savage's vocals land with a kind of weary certainty, circling lines about missteps, mixed signals, and the familiar pull of bad habits. 'I've been living on the warpath, it's just me, myself and I against me again' opens the door into the song's world, a place where momentum covers up doubt and desire loops back on itself. By the time the refrain arrives, 'I guess that's the way she goes,' it feels less like resignation and more like a quiet understanding of the patterns you fall into, even when you see them coming."
The band showcased both singles in recent music videos from director David Hughes. "The Way She Goes" highlights the band's bravado with sharp suits and a noir attitude. The playful clip for "Sucker" captures the track's infectious energy and the band's self-deprecating vibe in vibrant hues.
The Fake Friends recorded at MixArt Studios with NoFun Audio's Jordan Barillaro at the helm. The six-piece features the outsized personality of Matthew Savage on vocals, backed by guitarists Felix Crawford-Legault and Luca Santilli, bassist Michael Kamps, keyboardist Bradley Cooper-Graham, and drummer Michael Tomizzi. That group has roots in a host of Montreal punk groups, including Trigger Effect, Mundy's Bay, Watch for Wolves, and Kennedy.
The new record follows 2024's mini-album Always Worse / Never Better.
Holy Fuck"Evie"
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Toronto veterans Holy Fuck return March 27 with Event Beat, their sixth album and first in as many years. These 11 songs find the quartet reunited after an extended break, reviving their heady twist on electronica, noise, and groovy post-punk at a 2022 retreat to Great Village, Nova Scotia. There, the band lived and recorded together, striving to keep "every element as live as possible, emphasizing improvisation and raw percussion over click tracks and loops."
The new record reunites the band's Deleter lineup of Brian Borcherdt, Graham Walsh, Matt 'Punchy' McQuaid, and Matt Schulz, with the quartet both performing and engineering. Unlike their previous records, Event Beat features no guest vocalists.
You can preview the LP through the throbbing, funky lead single "Evie," as featured in a new video by Colin Medley that captures the band performing live in the studio. It's a fascinatingly unadorned snapshot of the group, who play faced inward amidst a mess of equipment. The piece underlines the group's redoubled effort to craft and present their material organically. Holy Fuck, here at least, are very much a band in the traditional sense.
Brian Borcherdt commented on the album's outlook and the group's assertive collectivism, stating that the record strives "towards something that is beyond personal control, either at the mercy of some bigger system or some unspoken will."
The new record follows 2020's Deleter LP and 2022's "Ninety-Five" single. In the interim, Borcherdt and McQuaid reconnected with original Holy Fuck drummer Loel Campbell (Wintersleep, Contrived) to record as the noise-punk side-project Cut Cult. They issued the First Three cassette last year.
Status/Non-Status"At All"
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Restless Anishinaabe songwriter Adam Sturgeon returns March 6 with Big Changes, the latest from his London, Ontario-based Status/Non-Status. Their 11-track LP, arriving through You've Changed, finds Sturgeon grappling with foundational questions of identity and belonging while navigating his role as a father amid "what is beginning to feel like a real apocalypse." The artist takes a dim view of the current climate, describing it as "a war on people and their ways of being."
You can preview the album now through lead single "At All," a sludgy, melancholy indie-rocker featuring tape loops from Zoon's Daniel Monkman and Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew singing backup. Sturgeon commented on the track's origins:
"I was starting to feel really disillusioned at the time of writing this song. Confused about the state of music and the complex world we are living in; the grind to make each day work. I decided to disappear, bunker down at home, stay in, write songs about it and invite my friends over to visit and play along. I wrote over 40 songs and this was one of the first to come out of me. It's a bit self explanatory, I think anyone with a passion and a crappy day job standing in the way can relate."
Big Changes builds on the momentum of Sturgeon's celebrated partnership with Daniel Monkman as OMBIIGIZI, which yielded 2022's Polaris-shortlisted Sewn Back Together. For this record, Sturgeon recruited Dean Nelson (Beck, Thurston Moore, Stephen Malkmus) and Matthew Wiewel to construct a home studio in the former church he now calls home. The record, recorded by Nelson, features a raft of collaborators, including Rachel McLean, Colleen Coco Collins, Julie Doiron, and Sunnsetter's Andrew MacLeod. Sturgeon's core band features drummer Eric Lourenco, Jessica O'Neil and Kirsten Kurvink Palm alternating on guitar and synth, and bassist Steven Lourenco. Most of those individuals carry over from the group's earlier life as WHOOP-Szo.
Status/Non-Status last released Surely Travel in 2022, followed by the 2023 EP January 3rd. Last fall, the band foreshadowed the new record with a faithful cover of the Eric's Trip classic "View Master." You can find it, and the new single, streaming everywhere now.
