Subterranea by Sunglaciers

Sunglaciers’ music blurs the boundaries between dazzling indie-rock and icy post-punk experimentation. On the Calgary band's sophomore LP, Subterranea, co-produced by Chad VanGaalen (Flemish Eye, Sub Pop) and mixed by Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire, Yves Jarvis), they carve out new sonic spaces with laser focus. While past releases explored a maximalist approach, these 13 songs emerge and vanish in rapid succession, never outstaying their welcome. 

“We tried to write vertically instead of horizontally,” explains multi-instrumentalist Mathieu Blanchard. “Our last album Foreign Bodies and the EPs that came before it had lots of long songs with different parts drifting back and forth. For this album, we decided to strip our songs down to two or three minutes with only a few ideas in each of them.”

The result is an urgent and cohesive full-length statement, drawing on influences from the high drama indie-rock of Deerhunter, Total Control’s post-punk tenacity, and the woozy grooves of BEAK>. “Subterranea came together during the pandemic and the changing of gears that we had to do,” says Resnik. “Essentially, we took all of our musical tendencies and mashed them up into one thing.”