The horns on “Not Around Anymore” don’t announce anything. They hover while the rest of the band assembles around them. By the time Kevin Drew’s voice arrives, the song is already four things at once, which is the only way Broken Social Scene know how to begin.
Remember the Humans is their first record in nine years, made partly at a studio they built in Warkworth, Ontario, with David Newfeld producing. Newfeld worked on You Forgot It in People and the 2005 self-titled. His instinct has always been to treat the stereo field as spatial rather than ornamental: instruments hard-panned, sounds dropping in mid-phrase, the mix behaving less like a finished object than a room mid-conversation. That suits a band whose lineup has never been fixed and whose best songs sound like they’re still being written as you listen to them.
Twelve tracks. Hannah Georgas takes lead on “Only the Good I Keep,” her first as a principal voice on record. The song holds its ground without leaning on the ensemble. Georgas wrote the lyrics around adolescent memory, something she had to find her way into privately before bringing it back. You can hear that distance in how she sings it.
“Relief” is Lisa Lobsinger, and it hits harder than anything else here. Justin Peroff’s drums are up in the mix, the structure stripped to a two-chord pulse, and Lobsinger turns the repetition into something that accumulates. Drew said the song came to her as a memory of a BSS track that didn’t exist yet. The song carries it: familiar from the first bar, unexplained.
Feist on “What Happens Now” is an outtake from Hug of Thunder, reshaped to belong here. Thin arrangement, muted drums, her voice doing most of the work. “I just died and I’m still in love with life” is the kind of line that either earns its sentiment or collapses under it. Here it holds.
The quieter tracks are where the record is most itself. “This Briefest Kiss” builds around Brendan Canning’s bass and Ariel Engle’s voice, moving at different speeds until near the end when the track starts dissolving into its own process. “Life Within the Ground” is Jill Harris and piano and almost nothing else. “Parking Lot Dreams” closes on acoustic guitar, Drew’s vocals barely above a murmur, the bass appearing late and staying low. About death and heat and bodies. Ends without resolving anything.
Andrew Whiteman’s Cuban tres on “Mission Accomplished (Kingfisher)” is one of the more specific pleasures on the record. “The Call” is where the band turns the amplifiers up: Whiteman on lead vocals, harmonies stacked, horns pushing against the guitars. Peroff driving the whole thing.
Tiny bits of studio chatter stay in the mix throughout — “Can I have a little more of that click?”, “Go for it” — left in deliberately by Newfeld. Not a subtle gesture. It doesn’t need to be.
Remember the Humans is out now via Arts & Crafts/City Slang.
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