Think About Life play Rialto Hall on Saturday 26 September, their first show in nine years. It has already sold out.
The POP Montreal booking puts them on Parc Avenue with Pigeon Phat and Underpass supporting. Doors at 8:30pm, show at 9:30pm.
The band formed here in 2005 around drummer Matt Shane and keyboardist Graham Van Pelt, with Martin Cesar on vocals. Alien8 Recordings released their self-titled debut on 2 May 2006 and Family in 2009. They toured North America, Europe and Asia through 2011, then stopped.
The last time anyone saw them was also a POP booking. In September 2017 they reunited for one night at Piccolo Little Burgundy and premiered “HBO,” their first new song in eight years. Nothing came after it. The catalogue went up on streaming services, and the members went back to what they had been doing instead.
That is most of why the name still travels. Van Pelt records as Miracle Fortress and co-directed Friendship Cove, the all-ages space that gave a lot of this city’s bands their first stage. Cesar records as Dishwasher and sang in Donkey Heart before this. Caila Thompson-Hannant, who joined later, spent the decade since as Mozart’s Sister. Greg Napier and Brendan Reed have both passed through the lineup. Between them they account for a decent slice of what Montreal indie sounded like in the late 2000s, which is the actual reason a two-album band that stopped touring in 2011 can empty a room’s worth of tickets in advance.
POP Montreal runs 23 to 27 September. The 25th edition leans hard on the festival’s own history: the long-closed Divan Orange reopens for three nights, two of them with Plants and Animals, and Secret City Records marks twenty years with Klô Pelgag, Brad Barr, Basia Bulat, Antoine Corriveau, Unessential Oils, La Force, Shad and Bye Parula. Think About Life sit in the same category, a band the festival helped build and is now bringing back.
The rest of the 177-artist lineup includes Luna, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, High Vis, Chad VanGaalen, Julie Doiron, Spencer Krug, La Sécurité, Squirrel Flower, Cutty Ranks, Uffie, Lucrecia Dalt, Fred Frith, René Lussier and Nardwuar the Human Serviette.
No word yet on whether the reunion comes with anything new attached. In 2017 it did, briefly.
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