In just one month, Calgary’s post-punk meets psychedelic pop outfit Sunglaciers will be releasing their new album Subterranea via Montreal imprint Mothland. Today, the band is sharing the video for “Out Of My Skull” which arrives with a new video from director and songwriter Evan Resnik.

“Out Of My Skull” is “dark but it’s lively.” says Resnik. “I shot in black and white to lend a bit of a classic, noir vibe to the video, which also helped bring out some of my innate 90s influence.

“The lyrics loosely reference Miles Davis and a few moments from his life: his hiatus from 1975-80, a shooting in 1969, being assaulted by a cop outside Birdland in 1959. I watched a lot of music documentaries in early 2020 when we began writing this record. Miles was a mysterious and brooding artist, and that initial inspiration helped me get into that mindset during songwriting and throughout the video production. The video is intimate but detached, with close-up faces in contrasting, unreal environments. We’re in your face, but we’re not really there. We had a lot of fun shooting, and I think that comes through in the video and adds a bit of levity.”

Subterranea is anchored in strange realities from our times. This new effort from Evan Resnik and Mathieu Blanchard (the pair behind Sunglaciers) is also laced with a certain optimism, perhaps the work of well-calculated psychedelic elements and headbanging rhythms, making for a most-rewarding listening experience.

Like their name might suggest, Sunglaciers’ music blurs the boundaries between dazzling indie-rock melodicism and icy post-punk experimentation. On the Calgary quartet’s sophomore album, Subterranea, co-produced by hometown hero Chad VanGaalen and mixed by acclaimed engineer Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire, Yves Jarvis, The Unicorns), they carve out new sonic spaces with laser focus. While past releases found the band exploring 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 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.”

Photo Courtesy: Haley Gunn