When Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner is reached on the phone, the singer-guitarist is in the midst of a mixing session at a Seattle recording studio. The purpose of our call is to talk about the Montreal indie-rock band’s recent comeback. Instead, we spend the first half of the 30-minute conversation discussing US politics. This train of thought includes a lengthy explanation from Boeckner about the similarities between Russian political advisor Vladislav Surkov and current White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. “I kind of feel like America gets to live in the dream of a nihilistic alcoholic who seems to just want to die,” he says, with a wry laugh. “Sorry, I could go on. It’s been weird being here [in the US] for this week. Every day is some fresh hell on Twitter.”
Despite his concerns about the current political climate, Boeckner is cheerful when talking about Wolf Parade’s recent comeback, which follows a five-year hiatus. When the quartet returned to the stage in New York last May, they discovered that their audience had expanded to a new generation of fans who had been too young to attend their 21-plus shows the first time around. “It was humbling, because we never had radio play,” reflects Boeckner. “We didn’t appear on a lot of television shows. We didn’t even do a lot of licensing. But the band seems to have resonated with people that I would hope it would resonate with.”
Considering Wolf Parade’s enduring success, why did the members go on hiatus in the first place? Boeckner explains that the musicians’ DIY ethos caused them to become exhausted during the promotional cycle for their 2010 album, Expo 86. “Our band is self-managed, so that adds a whole other layer of stress to essentially running a business,” he notes. “Putting food on the table and paying your fucking rent – all of that, combined with the amount of touring we were doing, it was going to negatively impact our friendships with each other.”
Although the musicians took a step back from their best-known project, they all remained active musically: Boeckner played electro-rock under a variety of guises (Handsome Furs, Divine Fits, Operators), singer-keyboardist Spencer Krug pursued his shape-shifting solo vehicle Moonface, guitarist Dante Decaro released a 2016 EP under his own name, and drummer Arlen Thompson played in what Boeckner calls “a bunch of experimental bands that don’t really have anything to do with rock.”
In the lead-up to their comeback gigs, the musicians got together for some freeform jam sessions in which they began to work on new material. “The first jam was fun but pretty awful, musically speaking,” Boeckner remembers. “But we had a blast. The second one was better, and we started writing songs and booked shows. That was that. It was on.”
The band’s onstage return coincided with a new EP, simply titled EP 4, which highlights the band’s jittery post-punk tendencies at their catchiest and most upbeat. Now, less than a year since EP 4, Wolf Parade are putting the finishing touches on a full-length, which Boeckner promises will be “lush-sounding, I think, compared to a lot of our other stuff, and heavy.”
Naturally, the new tunes were partly inspired by American politics. “When I started writing the lyrics for a lot of my songs on the upcoming record, Trump had been elected, so he does figure on the record,” says Boeckner. “It’s very of the moment when we wrote it. Spencer and I have had a lot of conversations about this: Some of the songs on the record address the idea of what is art’s function in a time of unprecedented political instability and potential authoritarian clampdowns.”
We’re living in alarming times, but Boeckner is happy to have his Wolf Parade allies at his side. With a chuckle, he says, “I wouldn’t rather be spending these proto-apocalyptic days with anyone else.”
Wolf Parade play Feb. 22, 23 and 24 at the Imperial. Tickets $31.50 at TicketWeb.ca.
