Welcome, audiophiles, to a listening experience which I have been waiting all summer to share with you. I have to say it is a really amazing thing when you can truly follow a band early enough in their career that you can watch them grow as musicians and as a unit. It feels like it has been a long and productive year since I started essentially stalking Montreal up-and-comers The This Many Boyfriends Club. When I first caught one of their shows last fall they allowed me to immediately tap into a musical part of me that I hadn’t visited in more than a few years. They were loud. They were abrupt. They sent chords screeching through my brain with a relentless energy. And as the classic guitar-bass-drums-vox combo beat its way through my body I was uncomfortable and comforted. There it was. The spirit of the 90s reared its grungy head and said “Dave, I better see you thrashing around enough that your entire upper half is sore tomorrow morning.” It wasn’t long before I had hit my head on a low-hanging lead pipe in a run-down basement venue, but I was too drunk and too euphoric to notice the steady stream of crimson falling down my face. Since then I have seen this band at every opportunity, and they just get better every time.

And what better way to be true to your roots than to release a brand new EP on a cassette tape wrapped in a duct tape sleeve? That’s right people, Casimir Frederic Coquette Kaplan (guitar/vox), Veronica Danger Winslow-Danger (vox), Lara Oundjian (vox), Andrew Miller (bass/rocking out), and Evan Magoni (drums) have brought back the cassette with Die or Get Rich Trying. Over the span of time between now and the release of their previous EP, Anything is Popsicle, they have been defining themselves as musicians, as songwriters, as performers, and most importantly as a group. They sound far more together than they did a year ago, and it has elevated both their live shows and their recordings to dangerous proportions.

While Die or Get Rich Trying is a huge step up, I believe that the real gem of these, our favourite Boyfriends, is concealed on the B-side of the aforementioned tape. Wait, what’s this? Only a bonus EP, titled A Pumpkin Like You, quietly lying beyond the reaches of the interwebs for someone to dust off their tape player and listen to a physical piece of music. Not only does it contain just about all of my favourite Boyfriends songs, its quality and more sonically experimental nature take it far beyond anything they had done before. So grab the tapes before they’re gone!

I wish I could teleport you all to a Boyfriends show right at this moment (quite frankly I wish I could teleport myself to a Boyfriends show), but all I can do is say snatch up any and all of their EPs, catch their Halloween show in Montreal, and skip stones until the eventual arrival of a debut album from these charming, loveable, and head-injuring pop-punksters.

Much Love,

~Dave