Afternoon Bike Ride’s third album, Running With Scissors, feels like stumbling into a quiet apartment where someone has been mid-thought for hours, the kettle still warm, a guitar left leaning on the couch. The Montreal trio — Lia Kurihara, Éloi Le Blanc-Ringuette, and David Tanton — have built a reputation for blending folktronica, ambient textures, and understated pop into something deeply human. This time, they’ve sharpened the edges. The result is their most cohesive work yet, but also their most emotionally weighty.
It opens with “20 Seasons,” a short prelude with Kurihara’s voice gently perched above plucked guitar, setting a tone of intimacy before the record widens its lens. “Otherworld” follows, bringing shuffling percussion and layered production that stretch the space around the vocals. There’s a sense of openness here — the song feels almost panoramic, letting the listener step inside. By the time “See Me Old” arrives, the band have settled into their characteristic Sunday-afternoon ease, only to gradually let the song bloom into strummed guitars and a subtle layering of instruments before stripping it back again.
Afternoon Bike Ride excel at these kinds of dynamic movements, where a song expands and contracts like breath. “Beautiful & Treacherous” sits in the middle of the album like a quiet monologue — shimmering guitar, sparse keys, and Lia’s vocals barely above a whisper. “Reincarnated,” at under thirty seconds, is less a song than a bridge, a soft inhale before “Abigail,” one of the record’s clear high points. Here, rolling percussion and lush piano chords wrap around Lia’s meditations on past and future lives. The track feels both dreamy and claustrophobic, an intentional tension that allows the vocal to soar in the closing moments.
Singles like “Oh No!” and “Miss Universe” act as anchors for the album’s second half. “Oh No!” is subdued, spacious, and feels like a soft reset before the record pivots toward its most personal material. “Miss Universe,” inspired by the experience of caring for a parent through illness, is as therapeutic as it is melancholic. It offers the listener a safe place to hold grief without letting it drown the light. The song moves from a fragile, almost childlike perspective into something more expansive, where percussive pulses and guitar lines suggest a cautious hopefulness.
Production-wise, the album often sounds as though it’s being played in the room with you. “New Bliss” captures this especially well, with Lia’s words spilling over the mix until a glitchy break interrupts and reorients the listener. “Feel Through” and “Aurora” lean into the band’s atmospheric side, the latter a brief, violin-tinged daydream before the title track closes the record. “Running With Scissors” brings everything back together — Lia’s voice pushed forward, guitars gently cascading, percussion fading in as if from another room. When she sings “I’m in over my head,” it lands less like a confession and more like acceptance.
What makes Running With Scissors so compelling is its refusal to separate the personal from the cosmic. The band seem equally comfortable musing about reincarnation as they are writing about childhood memories. The record’s emotional weight is tied to Kurihara’s experience as a caregiver, but it avoids sentimentality. Instead, it finds beauty in small, transient moments and lets the songs sit with the listener rather than push them toward resolution.
Afternoon Bike Ride have always been good at crafting music that feels lived-in, but here they’ve pushed further, toward discomfort, toward clarity, toward a sound that invites the listener to slow down and pay attention. Running With Scissors is a record that sits patiently, waiting for you to notice how carefully it’s been assembled. And when you do, you might find yourself staying longer than you planned.
Running With Scissors is set for release on September 19th via Friends of Friends.
Photo by Akina Chan
Share this :
