Presented by:
Triple D's, Speakeasy
Wine Lips
Wine Lips
It’s been one hell of a wild ride for Wine Lips.Originally formed in Toronto back in 2015 as a part-time project between Cam Hilborn (vox, songwriter, guitar) and drummer extraordinaire Aurora Evans, Wine Lips quickly escalated into a full-blown, full-time, full-on international phenomenon. Their debut album took them across North America followed immediately by an intensive and unexpected tour of Hong Kong and China in 2018. They released their massive “Stressor” album the very next year (2019) to rave reviews and massive critical acclaim. Multiple tracks from Stressor charted across North America and Europe radio, while several songs ended up being featured in broadcast and Netflix series. Endless touring ensued.Then 2020 happened. The band used their mandatory downtime to fully dedicate themselves to crafting their groundbreaking third full-length “Mushroom Death Sex Bummer Party” (recorded by Simon Larochette at Sugar Shack). The record was released in October 2021 and then shit really hit the fan. The international music press lost their collective minds, penning over 250 glowing features and super positive reviews spanning 35+ countries. At the time of writing, the album is rapidly approaching 20 Million spins on Spotify alone. The vinyl release of MDSBP is currently in its 7th pressing with 9 different colour variants. The lead track “Eyes” has been licensed to a metric ton of films, series and video games including ABC’s The Rookie, Hockey Night In Canada and VR Skater. Even more endless touring ensued, except this time the venues were huge and mostly sold-out.Which brings us to the new record… “Super Mega Ultra” is an absolute beast. Recorded by Simon Larochette at The Sugar Shack in Ontario, the album is jam-packed with 12 ramped-up supersonic ear-scorching auditor delicacies. SMU is probably Wine Lips’ most ambitious undertaking to date, exploring new thematic territory while firmly maintaining their signature psych garage punk rock panache. You truly need to hear the album to believe it… And if you haven’t already guessed, more endless touring is booked for 2024. The wild ride continues!"It's tough writing a new record when you're always on tour. The previous album seemed to be doing really well and at times I felt like I was hitting a wall creatively. Long story short, I think this album turned out great. Simon always brings a good vibe at the Sugar Shack and we were able to try some new ideas and capture the energy without straying too far from our roots. Excited to see where these songs take us in the future." – Cam Hilborn“It's pure adrenaline, it's noise, it's intense, it's refreshing, and it feels life-giving. The garage-psych band's new album is, for all intents and purposes, pretty fucking crazy.” – Exclaim!“There’s a sensuality and strong sense of controlled chaos that these Canadians bring to life on the record.” – New Noise Magazine
Iguana Death Cult
After the pandemic hit, and the people of the world suddenly grew wary and suspicious of one another, Iguana Death Cult, one of Europe’s most exciting rock exports, became more than just a band to its members—it became therapy. “I think for the first ten times we went to jam,” says guitarist/vocalist Tobias Opschoor, speaking about the process of making the new album Echo Palace, “we just drank wine and talked about it, and just kept on talking for hours—and then were like, ‘OK, I have to go because I have to work tomorrow.’”Taking place at frontman Jeroen Reek’s apartment in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, these gatherings slowly shifted from talking about this surreal chapter of their lives—the days of quiet streets and cramped buildings—to making music about it. “I was living in a really crappy, leaky, ready-for-demolition apartment,” explains Reek, “with just one heat source—like a really old-school, gas stove kind of thing.” Working on cold nights, they had to gather around that heater together—a cozy approach that ultimately got their creative flow going, fast.Armed with the talents of Justin Boer on bass and Arjen van Opstal on drums, and tapping the keys work Jimmy de Kok for the first time on album, the band took their trademark melodic garage-rock style and expanded it out to make it vibier and looser, with each member contributing ideas to develop the sound palette in full. “We all get into this sort of blender and then everybody gives a little bit of a flavor to it,” says Opschoor.The sounds they started to make tapped into the band’s acerbic bite established on their first two LPs, 2017’s The First Stirrings of Hideous Insect Life and 2019’s Nude Casino—albums that sometimes felt like Parquet Courts colliding with Super Furry Animals. (Paste described Nude Casino as evoking “the colorful mischief of nights out where even a humdrum accountant can feel like a Clint Eastwood desperado.”) Their explosive performances of these records turned them into a cult live act among psych fans, who have thrashed to the band everywhere from Amsterdam to Austin. (It was during a particularly bananas set at SXSW that the band won over Innovative Leisure.) But working on this new album, huddled together as the world split apart, everything began to flutter like Remain in Light.Echo Palace may be the Iguana Death Cult music that’s most overtly about the strange cause and effect of groupthink, but the theme has been lurking there since the very beginning, when the band was first formed by childhood friends Reek and Opschoor over ten years ago. The name of Iguana Death Cult is a partial nod to Reek’s fascination with cults in general—and the “Iguana” part is a nod to Iggy Pop, whose first band was the Iguanas.Watching the pandemic paranoia and conspiracy theories steeping across their country, Reek wrote lyrics reflecting the scene in front of him: “Purple, veiny soccer mommies,” he sings in a deep, foreboding voice on the song “Echo Palace,” “Sharpening their guillotines.” It’s a cut so infectious that it betrays the density of its lyrics, which were adapted from a poem Reek wrote about the repercussions of “shutting yourself off from everyone outside of your own ideology.”While each song on the record wrestles with these confusing times, Reek is keen not to point fingers. “These songs were written in such a polarizing time – we lost friends to conspiracy theories and ideologies. There are so many conflicting views and opinions. But I also don’t want to sound like I have all the answers,” he explains. “We should continue to talk to each other.”Echo Palace sees the band push their psych roots further than ever before. With a wide-spanning interest in disco, dance music, New York No Wave and artists such as ESG, Talking Heads, Medium Medium, plus Squid, Pottery and Parquet Courts, the record is a melting pot of energy, groove, and playful experimentation, with only one rule – the audience isn’t going to be able to stand still.When it came time to record the full set, the band headed to PAF Studio in Rotterdam, and then had the self-produced album subsequently mixed by Joo-Joo Ashworth (Sasami, Dummy) at Studio 22 in Los Angeles and mastered by Dave Cooley (Tame Impala, Yves Tumor). As the instruments swirl and trade solos on “I Just a Want House,” a funky millennial nihilist anthem, you can practically hear the growth of a group that’s been pushing itself further and further with every tour and every Belgian-stove fuelled jam session. The album is a big swing, stretching Iguana Death Cult beyond its garage rock origins and taking them to a new realm.It’s the type of project that warranted having legendary Dutch jazz saxophonist Benjamin Herman stop by to add to the squall on tracks like “Oh No” and “Sensory Overload,”. “He is a hero of ours”, the band admit. “We’d go and hear him play with our parents when we were kids.” The added sax led these heady thrashers to morph into calculated freakouts, which warranted Reek and Opschoor to scream their guts out on tracks like “Pushermen,” and Boer and van Opstal knowing when to bring the rhythm section to a jazzy simmer on tracks like “Paper Straws.”The end result of Echo Palace is an appropriately worldly album from a group breaking past the confines of its home country. That’s not to say that Iguana Death Cult aren’t proudly Dutch; the group takes from the trademark hard work ethic of their Rotterdam base and applies it to their approach with music. But it’s 2022, and we’re less defined by our borders than ever before. “When we play in other countries, for me that gives the same amount of pleasure—or even more—than when we play in the Netherlands,” says Opschoor.“We’re not just little countries anymore, everything is global,” adds Reek, speaking about society at large—but he might as well be speaking about Iguana Death Cult itself. “We’re turning into a global thing.”
