Flute, trombone, flugelhorn. The shimmer arrives before the guitars, before Kevin Drew’s voice, before any of it resolves into something you’d call a song. “Not Around Anymore” opens Remember the Humans the way Broken Social Scene have always opened records: instruments gathering like people arriving at a party, slowly, a little uncertain, until the room fills and everything shifts.
Nine years is a long time. They spent a chunk of it staring backwards, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of You Forgot It in People with tours, reissues, a graphic novel, a documentary. The full archaeology of triumph. And then, apparently, they drove out to Warkworth, Ontario, a pastoral village known for maple syrup and lilac festivals, built a studio, and let the rotating cast of friends rotate through the doors until something new arrived.
What arrived is quieter than you might expect. The amps are turned down from where they sat on Forgiveness Rock Record or even Hug of Thunder. Post-rock impulses surfacing now and then, not as a direction so much as a gravitational pull they’re still aware of. Producer David Newfeld is back, the same hand that shaped You Forgot It in People and the 2005 self-titled, and his fingerprints are everywhere: hard panning, instruments dropping in and out, the stereo field treated like a room you can move around in.
“This Briefest Kiss” was originally nine minutes. What remains is Brendan Canning’s bassline, languid enough to make you recalibrate your pulse, and Ariel Engle doing things with her voice that have no business being this relaxed and this precise at once. Toward the end, the track dissolves into what sounds like a voice memo of a voice memo before blooming back open. Newfeld leaving evidence of the process inside the process.
“Life Within the Ground” goes almost entirely still, Jill Harris’s falsettos and piano notes scattered across the track like something falling through water. A lesser record would mistake restraint for ambiguity. Here the stillness just is.
The decision to cut a track featuring Emily Haines and Amy Millan matters, because it clarifies the intent. Drew wanted the mood consistent above all else. A certain kind of stubbornness in that, or generosity, the line being probably irrelevant on a record like this. Hannah Georgas arrives instead, on “Only the Good I Keep,” a Broken Social Scene debut fifteen years in the making, and she sounds like she’s been here the whole time, turning to Smashing Pumpkins radio singles and Julie Doiron for comfort while carpooling, drinking party punch, looking for something that might hold.
“Relief” is the moment the record opens up wide. Lisa Lobsinger at the front, Justin Peroff driving the drums like he has unfinished business, the two-chord pulse and descending chorus landing with the weight of something that’s been building for forty minutes. “What a relief / To finally feel / To finally be.” Drew is nearly fifty now and the conclusion he keeps circling, in his lyrics and in the decision-making behind this record, is that music can lift you but it can’t pull you back from the edge of something. That requires other people. Hands. Presence. Feist knows it too, on “What Happens Now”: “I just died and I’m still in love with life.” Nobody on this record is pretending otherwise.
Tiny studio chatter is left deliberately in the mix throughout, “Go for it,” “I’m into it,” “Can I have a little more of that click?”, and it lands because everything else on the record is asking the same question. Can I have a little more of that. The warmth, the room, the people in it.
Andrew Whiteman’s Cuban tres on “Mission Accomplished (Kingfisher),” those briny string plucks cutting through before he takes lead vocals on “The Call,” the searing harmonies landing against the cheerful horns. “Parking Lot Dreams” closing the record almost entirely on acoustic guitar and atmospheric strings, Drew singing about death vacations and a body in heat, the high-octave bass surfacing through the haze. The song is enormous and hardly anything is happening in it.
The brokenhearted love songs are still here. The images arriving in dream logic. You Forgot It in People. Remember the Humans. Twenty years and this band is still standing in the same room, asking the same people to stay.
Remember the Humans is out now via Arts & Crafts/City Slang.
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