Hooper has released his debut full-length, Super Duper, recorded live off the floor at Montreal’s Mixart Studios with a band that includes members of Fleece, Nora Kelly Band, and Pastel Blank. Most of it was cut in two days, and a lot of the vocals were performed live alongside the band. It sounds like it.
The album sits somewhere between the melodic craft of 60s singer-songwriters and the scrappier instincts of 90s indie rock. The arrangements are warm and stripped back, nothing overwrought. Songs feel lived in rather than laboured over.
Hooper’s background is worth noting. His father played in The Grapes of Wrath; his mother was half of indie-folk duo Lava Hay. He grew up on a small island off the BC coast, made his way through Toronto, reached the CBC Searchlight Finals while still in high school, and has since settled into Montreal’s indie scene, where the record clearly took root.
A few tracks give a sense of the range. “Roxton” is named after a Toronto street where Hooper and his partner lived during the summer of 2020. It moves through three moments in time: the summer itself, a future imagined from inside it, and a present-tense reckoning with what came after. “Graduation” draws on Richard Linklater, specifically Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!, and pairs that coming-of-age restlessness with a late 60s, early 70s sound. “My Favourite Mug” is, without apology, a love song to a coffee mug, and it works. “Looking Out for Me” was written in the wake of reading Trouble Boys, the biography of The Replacements, and channels something of their working-class tension without trying to sound like them.
Produced by Max Frazer and Hooper, mixed and engineered by Frazer, mastered by Gavin Gardiner.
Super Duper is out now.
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