There was a time, not long ago, when you couldn’t swing a glockenspiel without hitting a member of a sprawling Canadian music collective. The 2000s felt like a glory age for Canadian indie rock. At a time when online hype was currency, music blogs bursted with praise for Arcade Fire clones, Montreal was declared the new Brooklyn and Broken Social Scene proselytized Toronto’s music scene.
A decade later, __canada is better known internationally for the crossover pop and hip-hop of Drake and The Weeknd. Many of the buzziest indie bands, meanwhile, have faded away with the iPod Nano, only to reappear on festival bills, staging nostalgic comebacks for older Millennials. Then, there are the unicorns; the bands from that scene that went on to become reliable veterans, finding stability in an unstable field.
“It used to be the only people that kept going past a certain age were superstars and everyone else would just drop away and do something else,” muses AC Newman of The New Pornographers. “We’re in an interesting time where, really only the last generation of bands were the first to think about music like a life pursuit. Bands like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo and The Flaming Lips were the first to think, this is our job, this is what we do. Even if we don’t become massive we’re still going to keep doing it,” he says. “And if it works for them, why not us?”
It would have sounded ludicrous for Newman to ask the same rhetorical question 17 years ago when the New Pornographers debuted. Originally conceived as a one-off studio “supergroup” for a handful of Vancouverites including Dan Bejar of Destroyer and American alt-country hero Neko Case, the group only became a real “band” when their sugar rush debut album Mass Romantic created enough demand for them to hit the road.
A consistent catalogue of infectious songcraft has kept them there for the better part of two decades. They’ve kept it up by changing up their sound bit by bit from album to album without forgetting what got them there: harmonies and melodies first, everything else second.
Their upcoming seventh album Whiteout Conditions, out April 7, simplifies their deceptively sophisticated arrangements by focusing on longer grooves. It’s fast but laid back, matching the nervous energy that spawned a song like “High Ticket Attractions,” which Newman says is “about pre-Trump anxiety, from start to finish.”
“I always think it’s interesting that technology moves so fast now but music doesn’t,” he says, pointing to fellow indie rock lifers and tour-mates Spoon as an example. “Spoon today don’t sound much different than Spoon from 15 years ago. But think about the difference of 15 years between 1965 and 1980. Even The Rolling Stones had to go psychedelic for a while, go disco for awhile. But bands like Spoon or The National, they have such a singular sound and that’s a good thing. When the record comes out, you don’t get mad at them because it sounds like the last one. You think, ‘yeah, the last one was awesome and this one’s awesome too.’”
They’ve changed up ideas and lineups from album to album (Bejar, busy with a new Destroyer record, is not on Whiteout Conditions), but the fact that most of the members have other projects to filter their other ideas into has preserved the New Pornos as the vessel for their biggest, brightest hooks. But while Newman has, like his bandmates Neko Case and Kathryn Calder, released solo albums in the past, he says he’s now 100 per cent focused on The New Pornographers.
“This is my job, I have to take it seriously,” he says. “And that’s the weird part. I’ve given too much of my life to this. I don’t have a fallback career.”
While some of his ‘00s indies peers have found success working at record labels, producing music or making soundtrack music, only a few musicians really get to make that leap. If your band keeps you from settling for an office job, why not ride it out as long as you can? Especially, Newman notes, when records don’t sell 150 or 200,000 copies in North America anymore, as the New Pornos’ 2005 album Twin Cinema did. “If a rock band did that now, they’d be massive.”
“Play Money,” the opening song on Whiteout Conditions, explores that tricky balance between creativity and making a living. It’s especially urgent for Newman, who lives with his wife and young son in Woodstock, New York. He’s settled and happy there, but with Donald Trump threatening his health care, Newman is considering moving back to Canada (though probably not Vancouver “because it’s so stupidly expensive.”) Music may be his day job, but it’s not a day job that provides benefits.
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Those kinds of practical concerns seem ages removed from the zeitgeisty rush of the last decade’s indie scene, but maybe it’s the band’s ability to weather the music industry’s massive changes that allows them to keep at it while many of their peers have dropped off.
At a time when musicians often catch notice for their politics or their social media profile, the sort of craft-focused rock nerdery that Newman excels at isn’t exactly fashionable, but fashion and longevity rarely go hand in hand. As long as they’re able to keep cranking out indelible power pop, there’s going to be space for The New Pornographers.
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