Timber Timbre’s music has always traced a shadowed path, using cues of the past to fuse the sound of a distant, haunted now. On its fourth record – Sincerely, Future Pollution – Timber Timbre coats the stark, sensual sound of 2014’s Polaris Music Prize Short-Listed and JUNO Award-nominated album Hot Dreams in an oil-black rainbow of municipal grime. It is the cinema of a dizzying dystopia, rattled by the science fiction of this bluntly nonfictional time.
The first single, Sewer Blues, is an ironclad groove marked by plodding, heavy rhythm, cavernous delay, and a backdrop of starry synthesizers. Taylor Kirk’s nearly spoken words seem to emit from the underbelly of urban decay, carried on the ominous air of these troubled days. Today, NPR premieres the video for Sewer Blues.
Watch the video for Sewer Blues here via NPR.
Kirk had this to say about the setting of Sewer Blues and the album’s recording:
2016 was a very difficult time to observe. I hate to admit that normally I express more sensitivity than concern politically, but I think the tone and result on the record is utter chaos and confusion. When we were recording, the premonition was that the events we saw unfolding were an elaborate hoax. But the mockery made of our power system spawned a lot of dark, dystopic thoughts and ideas. And then it all happened, while everyone was on Instagram. The sewers overflowed.
Set for release on April 7th via Arts & Crafts, Sincerely, Future Pollution stands out in Timber Timbre’s catalogue of imagistic records, with Kirk and band-mates Mathieu Charbonneau and Simon Trottier taking a unique approach to Timber Timbre’s usual process of sonic invention. Kirk wrote the songs in late 2015 / early 2016, then arranged the music over a “very focused” Montreal winter working closely with the veteran Timber Timbre members. Kirk explains how Charbonneau and Trottier came to play more integral roles in the realization of Sincerely, Future Pollution, articulating the songs’ urgency with an unexpected palette:
My solitary sketching was left more rudimentary than in the past. The prior records, I’d decided what they were going to sound like. I’d imagined the arrangements when the songs were sketched. Down to anomalous sounds. There was a vision that was manageable somehow. This album was much less focused that way, but far more complex. It was complicated and challenging to the end, every detail seeming somehow counterintuitive.
Pre-order Deluxe LP here.
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For the recording, the trio – armed with "secret weapon" Olivier Fairfield on drums – travelled to La Frette château outside Paris, where they looked to the studio’s array of archetypal synthesizers for the flesh of the songs. Be it the freedom of recording abroad, or the revelation of these unexplored instruments, Timber Timbre found a release from artistic constriction and created its most daring work yet.
Sincerely, Future Pollution is Timber Timbre’s document of this generation’s degeneration and disarray. With Kirk as narrator, a party to the play, we get caught in the folly of the echo chamber, awed by the contrast of this gothic modern age.
Tour Dates (On Sale Jan. 19th, 10am)
06/04 Rennes, FR // Mythos Festival
08/04 Brussels, BE // Botanique
09/04 Amsterdam, NL // Paradiso Noord
11/04 Berlin, DE // Huxleys
13/04 Malmo, SE // Babel
14/04 Copenhagen, DK // Bremen Teater
15/04 Hamburg, DE // Uebel & Gefährlich
18/04 London, UK // Islington Assembly Hall
19/04 Paris, FR // La Cigale
28/04 Chicago, IL // Lincoln Hall
29/04 Minneapolis, MN // Cedar Cultural Centre
30/04 Winnipeg, MB // West End Cultural Centre
02/05 Edmonton, AB // Starlite Room
03/05 Calgary, AB // Commonwealth
05/05 Vancouver, BC // Vogue Theatre
06/05 Seattle, WA // Tractor Tavern
07/05 Portland, OR // Wonder Ballroom
09/05 San Francisco, CA // Great American Music Hall
10/05 Santa Ana, CA // Constellation Room
11/05 Los Angeles, CA // Echoplex
12/05 San Diego, CA // Soda Bar
Sincerely, Future Pollution Tracklist
1. Velvet Gloves & Spit
2. Grifting
3. Skin Tone
4. Moment
5. Sewer Blues
6. Western Questions
7. Sincerely, Future Pollution
8. Bleu Nuit
9. Floating Cathedral