WATCH / SHARE “HOLD ME IN YOUR MIND” HERE
LIVING HOUR’S SOMEDAY IS TODAY, OUT NOW VIA NEXT DOOR RECORDS
NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES CONTINUE NOVEMBER 24
BUY / STREAM SOMEDAY IS TODAY HERE
“Living Hour offer a soundtrack to malaise that feels both timeless and timely.” - Pitchfork
“Someday is Today is a beautiful meditation.” - Winnipeg Free Press
“Hazy, widescreen pop with emotive smoky vocals” – Brooklyn Vegan
“Luxuriating in languid textures—and balancing stormy swells with long stretches of gossamer softness — Someday Is Today is ideal for gentle swaying and sunbeam dozing.” - Exclaim!
“Living Hour covers a wide swath of influences with grace while never sounding like anybody but itself. Someday Is Today leaves the listener with butterflies in the stomach” - The Manitoban
“Winnipeg rockers Living Hour dream big with grandiose, all-encompassing shoegaze that stretches to the ends of the earth...With gauzy guitar hooks and wide-open, drifting vocals, Living Hour wear their heart on their sleeve. It is equal parts scuzzy noise and charming dream-pop.” – Stereogum
“Living Hour have captured the rawness of their surroundings and committed it to wax, forging an album of delicate human connection and melancholic vulnerability.” - Northern Transmissions
Photo Credit : Adam Kelly // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Recently returned from a road trip throughout Canada and the US supporting their new record, Someday Is Today, out now via Next Door Records, Winnipeg’s Living Hour will head out again for a run of dates that begins in their hometown before hitting the West Coast. Full tour dates can be found below.
Today, they are also sharing the new video for “Hold Me In Your Mind” from director Ryan Steel and cinematographer Jesse De Rocquigney. The track is about “the mystery of connectivity,” says vocalist Sam Sarty. “Human to human and all the inner biological electricity involved, human to technology to human and the electricity involved there. Also about everything else in between that we cannot perceive that’s at work, like when you think about someone out of nowhere so deeply and intensely while driving, and get a text from them, or see them walking down the street.”
“A brain worm song that starts as you’re walking home from a date’s house. A meditation on being perceived by people and technology. Feeling your small part in the massive web that is an interconnected ecosystem. You and your date, you and your cell phone, you and yourself, moving across the bridge. The psychic coincidences of thinking of someone while driving so deeply and intensely, then getting a text from them or seeing them cross the street. Thinking hard about someone, hoping your thoughts will affect the person you are thinking so they also think about you. Psychic connection."
Of the video Sarty says, "first frost, walking around, remembering what it feels like again. Meditation on cars and security cameras, buildings and their window materials as it gets dark at 5pm. Finding the light, still walking and letting the loops inside my mind play out while staring into car head beams. Ryan and Jesse came along with me to shoot in some places around Winnipeg, reflection of the Red River, an old high school football field, buildings around. We collaborated on how the shots would look, a solo person enduring the day as it fades out into passing cars, floating away on one beam of light to the next."
MORE ABOUT SOMEDAY IS TODAY
Based in Winnipeg, an “inland island that floats on infinite prairie ground,” Living Hour has always been a band that thrived in seclusion. Suspended in the middle of a continent, Winnipeg is a place of cycles and extremes and the contrast of its seasons means the group is constantly adapting and making the most of what lies around them. Helping to foster a thriving local community, and taking inspiration from the faces and places of their hometown, the band have always been motivated by the belief that their own music only gets more interesting when it includes other voices.
For their new album, Someday Is Today, the band followed this vein of collaboration even further, calling upon friends and peers from near and far to impart their talents on the ideas the band had been harvesting. The fruit of this labour is Someday Is Today, the band’s third full-length effort and the much-anticipated follow-up to their 2019 Softer Faces LP, acclaimed by the likes of NPR, Stereogum, Paste, Vice, Bandcamp, and more.
WATCH / SHARE “FEELINGS MEETING” FT. JAY SOM
Living Hour’s core remains built around founding members Gilad Carroll (Guitar/Vocals), Adam Soloway (Guitar/Vocals), and Sam Sarty (Bassist/Keyboardist/Vocalist), who’ve been writing together since 2014, and Brett Ticzon (Bass/Keys/Drums), who joined the band in 2018. On Someday Is Today, the group’s sound is collaborated with a variety of drummer friends including Jason Tait (The Weakerthans, Bahamas, Broken Social Scene). The group’s sound is fleshed out further with the help of album’s three producers: Melina Duterte (Jay Som, Bachelor, Chastity Belt), Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Snail Mail, The Drums), and Samur Khouja (Cate le Bon, Deerhunter, Regina Spektor) all of whom impart their own backgrounds on the album’s finished glow.
Composed of eleven new songs, Someday Is Today is Living Hour at their most pensive and longing. The vulnerable lyrics are brought beautifully to life by lush and generous instrumentation that winds its way through the album. It was recorded over seven straight days during the dark depths of a Manitoba winter, with the band cocooned in the sounds they were making as the temperature hit -30 outside the door. “It’s a grind, but it’s incredibly challenging in a frustratingly beautiful kinda way,” Sarty says of their local environment. “It pushes you to keep going, to keep finding glimmers to move forward. A silver piece of wrapper sticking out a snowbank becomes your altar. The big grey sky gets me giddy.”
WATCH / SHARE “NO BODY” HERE
The recording process of Someday is Today wrapped up months of disjointed, electronic correspondence between the band members, all of whom spent 2020 in greater seclusion than they were accustomed to, recording ideas into phones and computers before sharing them with each other via zoom calls. The demos were built up remotely, piece-by-piece, in great contrast to the in-person rehearsals that had been so fundamental to their previous work.
This fractured breed of creativity naturally drifted into the songs themselves. Sam Sarty’s lyrics – pulled from journals, iPhone notes, and napkin scribbles – come suffused with reflections on disassociation, human interactions with technology, and a poignant contemplation of life in liminal spaces. The album’s cover artwork ties into these themes, with a vulnerable belly button peeking out from a pair of jeans.
Musically, the band’s sound grows to warm and earthy new perimeters on Someday Is Today. There’s the chugging brilliance of “Feelings Meeting” a collaboration with Jay Som, which immediately redefines the band’s capabilities. A rousing encapsulation of the album’s moods, it sways woozily between Sarty’s soothing voice and heavy instrumental breaks, the quiet/loud dynamics shift the tempo unexpectedly from crushing highs to breathy lows.
WATCH / SHARE “MIDDLE NAME” HERE
Elsewhere, “No Body” speaks directly to dissociation. Sarty’s fragile voice is backed by a slow ripple of percussion, describing a brooding, dark mood that drifts through a restaurant room by day with its faded laminate menus and faceless customers. “I’m staring at the sugar cube, it always has reminded me of you in softer hues,” Sarty sings with palpable despondency. A subtle juxtaposition, “Miss Miss Miss” showcases the band’s colourful experimental workings, the track offering a playful layering of their sound where clipped beats and splashes of synth conjure a languid groove that balances the emotional weight of the record.
The first Living Hour album to share lead vocals across different songs, Someday Is Today thrives by keeping just enough connection across its various sonic and thematic palettes for the whole thing to feel like one cohesive world. Whether it’s the album’s soft and gorgeous harmonies or the captured sound of wind tubes being swung above their heads, the songs here feel bound by something bigger than themselves; an energy that flourished in spite of it all, a human connection that grips just strongly enough even when pushed to its frayed, unreachable extremes. - Tom Johnson
WATCH / SHARE “MISS MISS MISS” HERE
TOUR DATES
Nov 24 - Winnipeg @ WECC
Nov 29 - San Diego @ Public Square
Nov 30 - Long Beach @ Alex's Bar
Dec 1 - Los Angeles @ Resident
Dec 3 - San Francisco @ Bottom Of The Hill
Dec 4 - Sacramento @ The Starlet Room
Dec 5 - Reno @ Holland Project
Dec 7 - Portland @ Doug Fir Lounge *
Dec 8 - Victoria @ Lucky Bar
Dec 9 - Vancouver @ Red Gate *
Dec 10 - Seattle @ The Vera Project *
* supporting Dear Nora
LIVING HOUR IS
Sam Sarty (she/her)
Gil Carroll (he/him)
Adam Soloway (he/him)
Brett Ticzon (he/him)
PRAISE FOR LIVING HOUR
"Slowdive just returned, but shoegaze music was already in good hands with Living Hour." – NPR
“Part dream-pop opus, part dust-covered Winnipeg melodrama, Living Hour’s scintillating new record is their most fully-realised body of work; a shimmering and radiant next-step that finds the band exploring whole new worlds.” – Gold Flake Paint
“Living Hour’s alterations of genre tropes are unorthodox but unassuming; the buoyant horns fit comfortably within the sound. Sarty’s voice is pretty enough for her heaviest lyrics to slip by a distracted listener…. but listen more closely, and [Softer Faces] will surprise you with its depth.” – Bandcamp Daily