Assistant Theme opens the album with a string of refusals. The song turns down being someone’s everything, their girl, a face they try on and replace. Distorted guitars push the tempo underneath while the two voices lock into close harmony. Then the list narrows to one modest wish: to fit in someone’s pocket like a note or a key, small enough to be useful whenever it’s needed. The title is a pun, and the joke lands a beat after the hook does.
Hannah Georgas and Lyn Heinemann met in a Vancouver studio in 2010, recording albums down the hall from each other, when an invitation to sing backing vocals started a friendship. Heinemann, formerly of Portico and Drawn Ship, later stepped back from performing to work in healthcare and kept writing on her own. Georgas kept recording and touring, and this year sang her first lead vocal on record with Broken Social Scene, on Only the Good I Keep from Remember the Humans. Local audiences have seen her twice this year: in March, opening for Matt Berninger at the Beanfield Theatre, where he joined her for Pray It Away, and last week with Broken Social Scene at Place Bell, sharing the final night of the All the Feelings Tour with Metric and Stars.
They reconnected in 2023 and began trading demos and voice memos between Belleville and Vancouver, each pulling apart the other’s ideas until both had room inside them. Bed tracks were cut in Toronto with engineer Graham Walsh, and the rest came together at Georgas’s home in Belleville. Sean Sroka produced and Alex Farrar mixed. Very little sits on top of the guitars and drums, and the drums often decide a song’s shape, so when the time signature slips under a melody, the change is easy to feel. Georgas sings with an even, unhurried delivery that lets the sharpest lines arrive without warning. The album is out on Beetle Bomb Records, Georgas’s new label.
Fully Slow, the first single, follows. Heinemann gives an impossible crush more room than she knows it deserves. “Go tell your man you don’t want him anymore,” she sings, briefly granting herself the authority to rearrange someone else’s life, then answers herself with “I wish you would.” She pictures this person taking her hand in front of all their friends. The chorus makes a case for keeping it imaginary, since lovers who never touch can never let each other down. Heinemann has said she builds whole romantic storylines without acting on any of them. Here the habit is sung out loud over one of the album’s brightest hooks, which leaves the admission nowhere to hide.
Begin Again eases off the tempo and brings the voices to the front. The melody has a summery lift, though the lyric is about being lost: someone stands in a doorway, undecided whether to stay or go, while the narrator describes trying to fold the water she’s holding.
Chain Chain Chain bounces along on a loose indie rock groove. Georgas told Stereogum the song is “about choosing commitment while quietly knowing the relationship feels broken,” and the lyric is full of vows sworn on lives and keys copied for someone else. In the chorus, the narrator boasts that the other person flows into her like a river into the sea, with an expletive for emphasis. By the final chorus the boast has flipped, and the other person is the sea. The song closes by chanting its title as the arrangement swells.
Devotion Is a Mess is the high point of the first half. It swings between quiet and loud, the guitars stay vivid through both, and the melody never loosens its grip. It recalls the melodic sweetness of Montreal’s Stars pushed through the Breeders‘ lurch between hush and noise. It is also the funniest song here. September comes round again and the narrator still wishes she didn’t want to be this person’s friend. She claims to be just as devoted while blocking their texts, then admits to being more devoted since they left. By the end she is clinging like an insect and asking to be crushed properly.
Much of the writing comes from harder ground. Heinemann lost her best friend suddenly, then sorted through the paperwork a death leaves behind while a long relationship ended; Georgas wrote about partnership and climbing out of depression and doubt. The same voice that jokes about blocking texts is working through all of this. Dreamlike slows right down at the album’s midpoint. Its images are of resuscitation: someone counting to ten, watching for a chest to rise, telling a body to get up and go back to where it started. There is no obligation to sound devastated every moment you are living through something devastating.
Economist turns on a partner who rations everything and keeps it all tight and in order, while the narrator wakes each morning stuck on the same thought; the line repeats three times, as if to prove it. A dream of being driven away from everything ends with her waking up in tears. Favourite and Temporary Mirror keep the pace laid-back, pulling the instrumentation back and letting the harmonies carry them. Favourite imagines someone dancing in the kitchen and wonders whether they’d stick around. Temporary Mirror has the record’s sharpest wordplay, pairing a seminary with a mercenary, and a narrator whose mouth makes the shapes of words that won’t come out.
The fittingly titled Say The End is another highlight, its uplifting melody carrying a lyric about long odds. Every moment the narrator spends waiting, she points out, is a moment someone else gets a chance, and her odds were never great to begin with. She wanders a hallway hoping for a glimpse. Late in the song, missing someone slides into wishing they were around, then needing them, before the chorus comes back one more time.
So Faint will be released on 16 October 2026 via Beetle Bomb Records.
Photo – Christine Reid
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