Yves Jarvis, returns with an expression of brazen songcraft and pure musicianship: 11 tracks he played himself, without a single additional contributor, transforming his acclaimed, three time Polaris Music Prize longlisted vision into the stuff of verses and choruses, hooks and hits, which vibrates like a cosmic anthropology.

On the genesis of the album Jarvis explains: “I basically only listened to Frank Sinatra for a year. I wanted Sinatra’s clarity—the way the songs exist without him, as real things. And he’s the interpreter.” Whereas Jarvis had previously approached music as something sculptural—as compositions that emerge spontaneously from raw sonic material—"this time I just made a ton of songs,” he says: “I had tunes stuck in my head. I had choruses. I had actual parts. Instead of making a world, I thought: ‘I’m a band. The drums are there to keep the beat.’

The goal became to articulate these songs as purely and as simply as possible. At home, in the studio, at subletted apartments in Montreal and L.A.—he’d roll out of bed and get straight to work, plugging his gear into a half-broken laptop. Whereas once he had fetishized analog tape, the idea of “using magnetic dust as a medium,” now Jarvis appreciates the value of working without any such preciousness: much of All Cylinders was recorded on bare-bones Audacity, sans plugins, “no pretense, no self-indulgence, music for the sake of music,” channelling the spirit of Paul McCartney’s II. “I feel like this is the least contrived thing I’ve ever done,” Jarvis declares. Lyrics that matter. Vocals up front, where people will actually hear them. “If something’s true to you,” he explains, “it’s probably true to a million other people.”