A turning point for Drew came with the Paris terror attacks of November 2015, which made him feel the world needed an Drew’s co-founder Brendan Canning was keen, but Drew and fellow BSS lifer Charles Spearin took more persuading. Injection of positivity: “It just sort of made us want to go out there and play. Then we set up shop in my living room and we were starting to come together in a very familiar kind of way, jamming in the living room, eating meals in the kitchen together, because that’s what the band is about: ‘Hey, let’s all get on the same page and get the energies flowing in the same direction.’” Because I think we’ve always been a band that’s been a celebration.“Ĭanning picks up the story: “By autumn of 2015 we had started getting together and trying some ideas out, just getting back in that jam space, in Charles’ garage. Recording finally began in April 2016 at The Bathouse studio on the shores of Lake Ontario, with later sessions in Toronto and Montreal, before the group went right back to basics. “It was very beautiful the way that it ended in Charlie’s little rehearsal garage space,” Drew says, “after going to all these studios. We just worked there, doing back-up vocals and handclaps and all the shit we used to do when we were younger.” And then it was to Los Angeles, where the album was mixed. The result is a panoramic, expansive album, 53 minutes that manages to be both epic and intimate. In troubled times it offers a serotonin rush of positivity: “Stay Happy” lives up to its title, with huge surges of brass that sound like sunshine bursting through clouds. “Gonna Get Better” makes a promise that the album is determined to deliver. That’s not to say it’s an escapist record: Broken Social Scene are completely engaged, wholly focussed, and not ignoring the darkness that lurks outside. But there is no hectoring, no lecturing, but a recognition of the confusion and ambiguity of the world. As the title track closes with Leslie Feist murmuring “There was a military base across the street,” the listener is caught in the division between the notional security provided by national defence, and the menace of the same thing. The gestation of Hug of Thunder was no idyll. When You Forgot It in People made their name, Broken Social Scene were young men and women. Fifteen years on, they were adults in or on the cusp of middle age, and – as Drew puts it – “all the adult problems in the world were happening around us individually, whether it was divorce or cancer”.
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