WATCH / SHARE “NO BODY” HERE
BUY / STREAM “NO BODY” HERE
LIVING HOUR’S SOMEDAY IS TODAY, OUT SEPTEMBER 2, 2022 VIA NEXT DOOR RECORDS
TOUR DATES CONTINUE JUNE 23, 2022
PRE-ORDER SOMEDAY IS TODAY HERE
“Some of the most heartsick synth-pop since Cocteau Twins. We're talking sweeping casios, massive hooks, and lovey-dovey feelings big enough to float on.” – VICE
“Hazy, widescreen pop with emotive smoky vocals” – Brooklyn Vegan
“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
Photo Credit : Adam Kelly // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Today, Living Hour are sharing the second track from their forthcoming album, Someday Is Today, out September 22 via Next Door Records. “No Body” is about “dissociating at a restaurant and feeling completely isolated and alone in the experience,” says vocalist Sam Sarty. “Close friends all around but you can’t reach out, you can’t say anything, hands numb, mind far away and foggy. Trying to ground myself with observations and saying my middle name; focus on something small like the rainbow floating through the glass. The background voices are calming, more positive thoughts pushing the mind into a softer world. A diner is a diner, your friends love you, the sky is still out there."
The single arrives with a video from Sarty and Talula Schlegel with editing from Brett Ticzon. Having been friends and artistic collaborators for some time, the three member team of friends working on vulnerable song “No Body” allowed for a soft and easy creation process. like a flower that opens.
The images were captured by Schlegel and Sarty driving out to the edge of Winnipeg on a clear evening. They filmed on mini-dv with 1000x zoom, working fast (2hrs) before the sun’s departure, they explored the camera, scale and spaces moving with and through the dimming light and changing skyscapes. Sarty filmed additional footage at home with the artificial sun replacement “sunset lamp” creating outlines and shadows on her wall. Living Hour band member Brett Ticzon then took the images and collaged them together into the complete video.
WATCH / SHARE “NO BODY” HERE
BUY / STREAM “NO BODY” HERE
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
BUY / STREAM “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.”
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.
PRE-ORDER SOMEDAY IS TODAY HERE
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.
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
TOUR DATES
Jun 23 - Winnipeg, MB - Park Theatre
Jun 25 - Calgary, AB - Sled Island
Sep 06 - Minneapolis, MN - Icehouse
Sep 08 - Toronto, ON - Baby G
Sep 09 - Ottawa, ON - Club Saw
Sep 10 - Elizabethtown, NY - Otis Mountain Get Down
Sep 11 - Montreal, QC - Casa del Popolo
Sep 13 - Boston, MA - O'Briens
Sep 14 - Brooklyn, NY - trans pecos
Sep 15 - Philadelphia, PA - Ukie Club
Sep 17 - Richmond, VA - tbd
Sep 18 - Baltimore, MA - Joe Squared
Sep 19 - Cleveland, OH - Mahalls
Sep 20 - Grand Rapids, MI - Pyramid Scheme
Sep 21 - Chicago, IL - Sleeping Village
Sep 25 - Fargo, ND - The Aquarium
SOMEDAY IS TODAY TRACKLIST
01 Hold Me In Your Mind
02 Lemons And Gin
03 Middle Name
04 Feelings Meeting
05 December Forever
06 Curve
07 Hump
08 Miss Miss Miss
09 Exploding Rain
10 No Body
11 Memory Express
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