A mythic tone always accompanies the subject of Half Moon Run’s genesis. The musical chemistry of Devon Portielje, Conner Molander, and Dylan Phillips is a continued source of wonder, even to the band, and even now – a decorous decade on. Half Moon Run’s collaborative power has remained constant and unsuppressed and their new album Salt sees them revisiting the site of their bond’s first forging, bringing visions to light that’ve been there in waiting since the beginning.
“While making this record, it felt as if we were boiling down a huge cauldron of musical ideas, trying to reduce it to something elemental,” Molander explains in examination of the album’s title. “And what we were left with was Salt.”
Across Salt, you’ll find a deep engagement with the bones of Half Moon Run’s beginnings, but the album reaches equally into the future with songs penned during the pandemic that bear the current moment’s all-permeating anxieties and the deep and universal need for hope. “In the thick of the pandemic it felt as if many people were uprooting their lives and moving on to some greener pasture,” Devon Portielje explains of the sentiment behind freshly-written “Everyone’s Moving Out East.” “Perhaps part of you would want to go with them but alas, you must stay.”
The album’s release has been preceded by the single “You Can Let Go”—which Portielje calls: “a tumultuous, transformative journey through the dark places of the mind towards, hopefully, the light”—as well as by the single “Alco”—a song decorated by elven textures, making expert use of silence and space in its drop-out chorus, showcasing the band at the height of their mastery of refined song-structures. “A song I wish Bruce Springsteen wrote,” is how Portielje describes the bittersweet folk ballad “Heartbeat” which calls to mind Nebraska’s palpable yearning and unflinching examinations of loneliness. Meanwhile “Gigafire” engages with climate anxiety and environmental destruction, responding to the California wildfires and tragic need for a new term to describe wildfires that stretch over a million acres. A more personal form of destruction is evoked by “Goodbye Cali”—an immersive evocation of the dangers of life on the road.
Half Moon Run’s ability to breathe new life into ideas that’ve been with them since the start has been bolstered by the vision of ascendant producer Connor Seidel, with whom the band previously collaborated on the song “Fatal Line” on Seidel’s concept album “1969.” Salt was largely created at Seidel’s Treehouse Studio—an idyllic escape north of Montreal where the band’s sketches had space to grow and take form. Seidel encouraged the band to dive deep into their rich archives. Mutually excited by what they heard there, early ideas were added to the immense batch of songs under consideration for the record. The band went through literal hundreds of cassette recordings mining for lyrical and melodic content: culminating in the completion of songs like the hypnotic “9beat” which features an odd-time signature rhythm that is somehow both tightly-wound and fully loose, showcasing the band members at their most synced-up and enmeshed.
Half Moon Run have called Montreal home since 2009, when they lived within a few blocks’ radius of each other in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood. Music was all they did. Their earliest musical concoctions were formulated at the Torn Curtain: a legendary DIY rehearsal studio that was central to the development of an extremely influential experimental local music scene in the early 2000s. The Torn Curtain has since been torn down and replaced by characterless condos, making it a place that is now only accessible through memory.
“We would spend entire days there, writing and jamming and drinking and talking, sometimes napping, more jamming before biking back home late at night,” explains Molander. “I remember Devon holding a portable cassette recorder up over his shoulder as we biked close together, listening to the playback of the demos we’d made that same day.”
The band was initially defined by their limitations, sharing their meagre collection of instruments amongst one another, looking for the most dynamic combinations they could produce using what they had. You can feel the desolation of their industrial surroundings in the sonic textures: brittle guitars, restless rhythms, unsettling low-end, cavernous reverb. At the same time, there’s warmth and comfort in the folky acoustic elements, the tight-knit song structures, and the group’s signature three-part harmonies, evoking a sense of shelter from the elements.
“In those days, we only had a couple instruments: an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, one amp, two mics, and Dylan’s drums,” Molander explains. “We wanted bass, so Dylan decided to try and play bass on a synthesizer while drumming—combining two roles into one so that we could do more with less. He bought a little Korg and mounted it on his kick drum. The first time he used it, we nearly lost our minds.” Necessity gave way virtuosity, and soon the group’s singular sonic characteristics started to take form. While working on the song “Dodge the Rubble,” Phillips started playing bass notes that inverted the chords, a minor third below what Devon was playing on the guitar. The simple effect this had on the group felt transcendent.
“We all sang together—one of us unamplified, for lack of a third mic,” Molander says. “Discovering that combination of sounds was a transformative moment: one I’ll never forget.”
Diving back into those same early demo cassette demo recordings ended up being the flint that shedded the spark to give flame to the band’s new release. “Dodge the Rubble” appears here in its final form. Testament to the band’s understanding—even in the earliest days—of their union’s rare power, they’ve always captured everything. A Tascam two-track’s red record light has been constantly illuminated when the band rehearses and improvises—a songwriting technique they’ve unwaveringly stood by, and that has been key to their ability to engage with their routes while forging ahead.“Dodge the Rubble” is a conduit to these three fledgling musicians being both nourished and punished by an experience of the city that was both inspiring and unforgiving. Drawing from the soul of the song’s essence captured on cassette years ago, resummoning it, and pushing it forwards into the unknown future is a collapsing of time that draws the group into communion with their younger selves and their futures—a form of time travel.
“We ended up shelving ‘Dodge the Rubble’ due to feeling uncertain about the lyrics,” Molander explains. “But when we came back to it in 2022, we found the uncertainty had all disappeared. In fact, something like the opposite sentiment blossomed in its place: an affection for our younger selves, those young men so eager and concerned about the state of the world, audacious in our approach to songwriting, undeterred by anything other than that which got our juices flowing. I love ‘Dodge the Rubble’ and it was a privilege to commune with our younger selves to bring it back to life.”
Salt is a broad and sweeping statement from a band at the height of their compositional powers. The gestation period of the songs here spans the history of the band, in an assemblage of the band’s newest and oldest ideas, in juxtaposition and in alliance, the past and future at once.