This interview was recorded at FME 2023 in Rouyn-Noranda and promptly got lost in the archives. Now that it was just found and La Sécurité is back with an album launch at POP Montreal, it felt like the right time to finally let it breathe.
It was September 2, 2023, and the Festival de Musique Émergente was in full swing in Rouyn-Noranda. Somewhere in the depths of Abitibi, in a basement that can only be described as aggressively hot, I sat down with Éliane Viens-Synnott and Kenny Smith of La Sécurité.
The heat was no joke. You could feel it making your thoughts slow down, your sentences drift. But the conversation crackled anyway, because when you get two people this sharp and this genuinely enthusiastic about what they’re making, no amount of humidity can kill the energy.
The band had a show at 1 a.m. that night. I was looking forward to it more than anything else at the festival. It did not disappoint.
How a Pandemic and a Name That Means Everything Started a Band
La Sécurité is not a superband, and Éliane will be the first to tell you so. It’s a collaboration between friends who are already deeply embedded in the Montreal music scene, people who found each other during COVID and decided to make something together rather than sit still.
It started with Éliane and Félix, the driving force behind Choses Sauvages. “We wanted to combine our influences,” she explains. “I come more from a punk background. I’ve drummed in punk bands. Félix has more of a groovy side. He likes a lot of electro, Talking Heads, ’70s art rock.”
The result is a record called Stay Safe, and yes, the title was everywhere during those years on every storefront window and government poster. That ubiquity is part of the point. The album captures something real about the emotional texture of that period: the anxiety, the dark humor, the weird solidarity, the desperate need to dance anyway.
When I asked Éliane and Kenny whether La Sécurité, as a concept, is about needing security or providing it, Kenny didn’t hesitate. “Music is keeping me secure day to day. It helps me emotionally, mentally, physically.” Then he thought for a second and added that the band’s compositions themselves carry that quality: tight grooves, clear structures, very little left to chance. “There’s not too much improvisation. It’s very structured and secure.”
Éliane pushed back, gently. “There’s room for improvisation live.” A pause. “That would be nice.”
That tension, between the security of structure and the freedom to roam inside it, runs through everything this band does.
The Language Question (Which Isn’t Really a Question)
The album moves between French and English without announcement or apology, which feels exactly right for a Montreal band in 2023. Éliane grew up in Western Canada, went to high school in English, and says it’s a little easier for her to write in English, but the band never made a policy decision about it. “Sometimes I think in French. Instead of having to choose a side, we just didn’t think it was necessary.”
Kenny, with perfect comic timing, added his own take: “It’s good for grants.”
The bilingualism is far from a statement, it’s just how their brains work. Which, frankly, is a more Montreal thing to say than any manifesto could be.
Do Everything Yourself, or Hire Nobody
One of the things that makes La Sécurité interesting beyond the music is how they operate. The band is full of multi-instrumentalists who swap roles without ceremony. The night before our conversation, Kenny had been on a Flying V, shredding for his other band Pressure Pin. Tonight, he was on drums.
COVID, for all the damage it did, handed a certain kind of musician something useful: time, government payments, and nowhere to be. “The payments bought me a lot of nice gear,” Kenny said. “A lot of recording time. Very helpful, monetary wise.” He built out his studio, learned to do more himself, and stopped needing others.
Éliane went in a different direction. She’s a drummer by trade, with a past life as a full-time DJ in her twenties, and La Sécurité pushed her to pick up the synth. “I did piano lessons when I was a kid, and I can find notes by ear. For the first few shows I had to look at what I was doing, but now I know where they are.”
There’s something charming about that image: one of the band’s key voices, feeling her way around a keyboard in real time, on stage, in front of people. Learning out loud to the point where now she can project confidence.
Félix, meanwhile, apparently relished stepping to the back. “He felt like just playing the bass and being more in the back, instead of being the center of attention,” Éliane said. When you front a band, you carry the whole room. Sometimes the most creative thing you can do is hand that weight to someone else for a while.
A Safe Space for Chaos
The band’s name pulls double duty. On one level it’s deadpan, a little absurdist, very Montreal. On another, Éliane describes the project itself as a kind of safe space: “We can explore any idea we want. Who cares if it’s in French, who cares if it’s in English. We have a slow song on our record. Rules don’t matter.”
The slow song in question is “K9,” a track on Stay Safe. Éliane called it the “90s prom night” track. One slow dance, deliberately placed. And yes, there is a lot of B-52s energy in this band, that same eclectic brightness that feels like a party and a provocation at the same time.
That energy carries a message too. Some of the lyrics take aim at the entitlement and social dysfunction that bloomed after the world unlocked. Éliane worked at L’Esco for six years before the pandemic shifted things. Watching a new generation come of age inside four walls and then emerge without the social wiring that usually develops in bars, in crowds, in the friction of public space, left a mark. “This etiquette of how to behave in a bar,” she said, trailing off, not needing to finish the sentence.
Kenny is back at it himself, bar tending and DJing the weekend after FME. Neither of them sounds bitter about it. They just see it clearly.
Catch Them While You Can: POP Montreal
La Sécurité is playing more shows now, and the big one is coming up fast: their album launch for Bingo!
POP Montreal on September 25th, 2026, starting at 9:00 PM. Get Tickets
If you haven’t seen them live, that is your moment. The 1 a.m. show at FME was everything I hoped for and then some.
The album Stay Safe is out now. Stream it, buy it, and if you can find the vinyl, grab it. Bingo! will be ready by POP Montreal.
The merch is worth seeking out too: Mélissa, their in-house artist, does all the drawings and screen printing by hand. The whole thing is one big DIY art project wearing a very cool disguise.
Writer: Randal Wark is a Tech entrepreneur, Managing Partner of MTech Cyber with a focus on cybersecurity along with a passion for live music. You can follow him on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. His Podcast RockStar Today helps musicians quit their day jobs with out-of-the-box advice from Ted Talk Speakers, Best Selling Authors and other interesting Entrepreneurs and Creatives. He created the Rock Star Today Music Business Jam Session for musicians. Randal is a collector of signed vinyl, cassettes and CDs.
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