Follow up to 2016’s No Shade is in the pipeline
The Lonely Parade is in limbo. The trio of guitarist Augusta Veno, bassist Charlotte Dempsey, and drummer Anwyn Climenhage all attended Peterborough’s Rock Camp for Girls, then officially launched as a band in 2011. They steadily rose to Canadian indie success, playing festivals like Sappyfest in Sackville, Lawnya Vawnya in St. John’s, and Kazoo! Fest in Guelph, and many, many other shows in between. But in the last six months, as the band members have relocated from Peterborough to Montreal, things have come to a halt.
Partly that’s due to the ebb and flow of the album release cycle. The group recorded their new record, the follow up to 2016’s No Shade, last August. “It’s done, we’re just sitting on it,” said Dempsey, speaking on the phone from Montreal. “It feels like there’s been a big lag,” added Climenhage. “We’ve been working on a lot of things, they’re just not in the public eye yet.”
But while they can’t go into the details of their new release, that hasn’t stopped them from breaking in the material live. In fact, recent shows have drawn almost exclusively from the new record. “We’re kind of the worst and get really tired of our songs really fast,” said Dempsey.
When it comes to some of their oldest material, tired is an understatement. I asked Dempsey and Climenhage for their feelings on the songs from their first record, 2014’s Sheer Luxury.
“I’m just plain embarrassed about them,” said Dempsey. Much of that embarrassment comes back to “My Mom Got Hit on at a Punk Show,” a perky pop-punk tune that started as a gag and became, to their chagrin, one of their most requested numbers. Only now, years later, are The Lonely Parade beginning to see the joke again. “We’re back to being like, ‘Yes, that was funny,’” said Climenhage. “It took a while,” said Dempsey.
2015’s Splenda Thief EP marked a turning point for the band. “Stuff got a little less… juvenile, if I’m being honest,” said Dempsey, “that was our first step into writing more serious stuff.”“Or establishing more of a set style,” said Climenhage. No Shade saw band members writing lyrics individually, lending each song a more cohesive, personal direction.
The new record marks yet another step in the band’s development. “We wrote with intention, [like] ‘This is for this album. This is how we want this album to sound,’” said Climenhage.
For now, if fans want to know how that album will sound, they’ll have to catch The Lonely Parade at one of their upcoming gigs — like this Friday’s appearance with Weaves at the Guelph Concert Theatre. Sometimes limbo isn’t so bad.
Lonely Parade play the Guelph Concert Theatre with Baby Labour and Weaves on Friday, March 2.
Illustration by Corben Grant