When We Are Wolves arrived on the burgeoning early-aughts Montreal music scene, their product was a kind of chaos magique. The duet of art-school friends Alexander Ortiz and Vincent Levesque were mischief-makers, contrarians—the kind of magicians who yank the tablecloth off a perfectly-set table simply to smash the dishes on the floor.
Formed in 2000 at the beginning of the “rock’n’roll revival”, We Are Wolves sidestepped that trend. Instead of donning white belts and wailing on guitars, they dusted off unfashionable analogue synthesizers and drum machines and conjured heavily rhythmical, primitive sounds overlaid with squelching synths and primal scream-therapy vocals. Signing with Fat Possum Records for their first album Non-Stop Je Te Plie En Deux in 2005, they became a unique voice in the global dance/art/punk explosion led by contemporaries like LCD Soundsystem, Liars, Bloc Party, and DFA1979. The band released five more albums over the next two decades, including the critically acclaimed Total Magique in 2007 and career highlight Wrong on Simone Records in 2016. The band toured extensively and performed at some of the world’s biggest festivals: SXSW (Austin), CMJ (New York), The Great Escape (UK), Osheaga (Montreal), FIMPRO (Mexico), Les Eurockéennes (France), Reeperbahn Festival (Germany), opening for such bands as And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, The Gossip, Gorillaz, Muse, Indochine, and Bloc Party.
Now, five years after the release of the EP La Main de Dieu, the duo of Alexander Ortiz and Vincent Levesque cast a spell for a sixth and final album. Many years in the making, this ultimate album confronts an era of social unrest, information overload, environmental cataclysm, and wartime malaise. What magic trick do they use this time? They somehow unsmashed the dishes, replaced them perfectly on the table, and slipped the tablecloth back under them—creating order out of chaos—by fashioning some of the sharpest and most concise songs in their catalogue, counterbalanced with their noisiest and most “out there” tracks. Featuring guitar contributions from A Place To Bury Strangers’ Oliver Ackermann and Joseph Yarmush of SUUNS, We Are Wolves harness the sounds of synth rock, garage rock, cold wave, post punk, cumbia, tropical psych, and 90’s alt-rock, achieving a decades- and continents-straddling mixtape in which lyrical themes of confusion and alienation are tempered by the clarity of masterful pop craftsmanship.
This new album, presented by the band’s longtime label Simone Records, was produced by the band themselves, and recorded in several places: at Death By Audio NYC with noise-master Oliver Ackermann of A Place To Bury Strangers; with esteemed producer Odin Parada while exiled in Mexico; and by Vincent and Alex in their studio. It was mixed in Montreal by engineer Adrian Popovich (SUUNS, DFA1979, Duchess Says).
