On June 21st, Islands will release their new album What Occurs, the tenth album in the project’s 18-year history that also marks a significant shift for the band. Preceding the meticulous production of 2021’s Islomania and 2023’s fine-tuned follow-up, And That’s Why Dolphins Lost their Legs, the brand-new record strips away detailed ornamentation for something much more immediate, raw and natural.
With an intent to capture the raw spontaneity from a band that has played together for a decade, Thorburn and co. recorded the songs live in the room, all together, with guitar amps and vocal mics bleeding into one another on multiple occasions.
Each song on the album is told from a different voice, like characters in a short story collection: There’s the lovelorn loser (“Drown A Fish”), the spellbound lover (“Tangerine”), and the doom scroller bracing for armageddon time (“What Occurs”). There’s the terrified idiot who thinks arachnophobia refers to a fear of snakes (“Arachnophobia”), and the kind soul who tries to let you down gently (“Sally Doesn’t Work Here Anymore”). We ride alongside the art thief who very nearly gets away with it (“David Geffen’s Jackson Pollock”), and bear witness to a liberation movement unfolding in real time (“Talk Is Cheap”). The songs’ narrators are afraid, outraged, turned on and hopelessly in love, running from—and towards life & death and everything in between.
Stylistically, the songs range from the apocalyptic folk of “On the Internet”—with Thorburn sharing his rarely featured baritone—to the druggy, Jupiter-4 synthesizer dream pop of “Sally Doesn’t Work Here Anymore.” Album opener and title track “What Occurs”, acts as a bit of misdirection, with a Penguin Cafe-esque piano plunking notes like a sequencer as it slow-burns towards a mandolin solo of all things.
From there, the album takes a quick left turn, with the up-tempo power pop earworm of “Drown A Fish.” “Arachnophobia” showcases the ‘60s inspired, Stax-style playing that guitarist Geordie Gordon excels in and the relentless salvo of angry guitar stabs on “Talk Is Cheap” contrast nicely with the chugging ‘70s soft rock electric piano stomp of “Move Some More”.
This is a physical record—despite Thorburn suffering a ghastly basketball injury just one week prior to recording, which left him in a sling, with a separated shoulder. Despite this, the band soldiered on, and Thorburn played through the pain. In a display of catharsis, the deranged garage rock freak out of “Boll Weevil,” found Thorburn down on all fours in the center of the room, howling like a wild animal.
Produced entirely by the band in the summer of 2023, and mixed by Colin Stewart (New Pornographers, Destroyer) in the fall of 2023, this is the only Canadian-made Islands record since the 2006 debut, Return to the Sea.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the song “Boll Weevil” (PRE-SAVE) and its video. With trippy visuals portraying the song’s namesake bug, the song is a spunky work of indie rock that bounces along with plenty of fervor and feistiness. There is a definite undercurrent of rambunctious garage rock that feels reminiscent of the 60s and 70s while still sounding fresh. As the band intended, the song conveys the energy of a live performance that signals how explosive this song could be during a performance.
On the song the band’s Nick Thorburn says:
We were looking to capture something trashy and bluesy in the garage rock tradition of bands like the Monks or the Sonics and I knew this song in particular had to be recorded completely live, so I got down on all fours like a dog and sang the song underneath a blanket, while the band played around me in a circle. We did it in one take without headphones as a band playing together in a room, letting the drums and amps bleed into each other. I added the organ afterward on account of being under a giant blanket.
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