Fifteen years on, they were adults in or on the cusp of middle age, and – as Drew puts it – “all the adult problems in the world were happening around us individually, whether it was divorce or cancer”. When You Forgot It in People made their name, Broken Social Scene were young men and women. The gestation of Hug of Thunder was no idyll. As the title track closes with Leslie Feist murmuring “There was a military base across the street,” the listener is caught in the division between the notional security provided by national defence, and the menace of the same thing. But there is no hectoring, no lecturing, but a recognition of the confusion and ambiguity of the world. That’s not to say it’s an escapist record: Broken Social Scene are completely engaged, wholly focussed, and not ignoring the darkness that lurks outside.
“Gonna Get Better” makes a promise that the album is determined to deliver. In troubled times it offers a serotonin rush of positivity: “Stay Happy” lives up to its title, with huge surges of brass that sound like sunshine bursting through clouds. The result is a panoramic, expansive album, 53 minutes that manages to be both epic and intimate. We just worked there, doing back-up vocals and handclaps and all the shit we used to do when we were younger.” And then it was to Los Angeles, where the album was mixed. “It was very beautiful the way that it ended in Charlie’s little rehearsal garage space,” Drew says, “after going to all these studios. Recording finally began in April 2016 at The Bathouse studio on the shores of Lake Ontario, with later sessions in Toronto and Montreal, before the group went right back to basics. Then we set up shop in my living room and we were starting to come together in a very familiar kind of way, jamming in the living room, eating meals in the kitchen together, because that’s what the band is about: ‘Hey, let’s all get on the same page and get the energies flowing in the same direction.’” Because I think we’ve always been a band that’s been a celebration.“Ĭanning picks up the story: “By autumn of 2015 we had started getting together and trying some ideas out, just getting back in that jam space, in Charles’ garage. Injection of positivity: “It just sort of made us want to go out there and play. A turning point for Drew came with the Paris terror attacks of November 2015, which made him feel the world needed an Drew’s co-founder Brendan Canning was keen, but Drew and fellow BSS lifer Charles Spearin took more persuading. “He just didn’t give up he just kept saying, ‘You’ve got to strike, you’ve got to do this, the time is now,’ and so finally we agreed.”Īs might be expected to be the case with a many-headed hydra of a group, getting all the principals to agree wasn’t easy. “He started showing up at our label, asking if we were going to make an album,” Drew recalls. But the idea that they might turn their hand to something more than greatest-hits sets had been stirring since November 2014, when producer Joe Chiccarelli told Drew the group needed to make a new album. Ñ the odd festival show here and there, preferably ones that involved the least possible travelling. Its title, Drew says, captured what he wanted people to feel about the group’s comeback, and how they sound playing together again: “It’s just such a wonderful sentiment about us, coming in like a hug of thunder.”īroken Social Scene had reconvened, in varying forms, several times over the past four years Ñ a song that will become as beloved as “Anthems For a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” from their breakthrough album, You Forgot It In People. The title track on its own might just be the best thing you will hear all year It is righteous but warm, angry but loving, melodic but uncompromising. On Hug of Thunder the 15 members of Broken Social Scene – well, the 15 who play on the record, including returnees Leslie Feist and Emily Haines – refract their varying emotions, methods and techniques into something that doesn’t just equal their other albums, but surpasses them. They have that right because they have created one of 2017’s most sparkling, multi-faceted albums. But with Hug of Thunder, the fifth Broken Social Scene album, Drew and his bandmates have a right to feel presumptuous. “I don’t want to go out there being presumptuous,” Kevin Drew says, “because, I’ve worn those presumptuous shoes before, and you don’t want it to feel like, ‘Oh, what a let-down.’” That’s the fear when you bring back one of music’s most beloved names seven years after their last album.
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