Toronto four-piece cootie catcher is playing for keeps. Their new album, “Something We All Got,” pairs the tender warmth of twee pop with spiraling synths and live electronics, earning the band a spot on the 2026 Polaris Music Prize Long List, a 40-album roster of Canadian releases judged entirely on artistic merit rather than sales or genre. The band plays Soda Bar on Monday, July 6.
Singer Anita traces the band’s origin to the pandemic, when she and multi-instrumentalist Nolan started recording together as a two-piece, mostly just to stay busy.
“Once we realized we wanted to play live, the band expanded,” she said. “Sophia joined, and later Joseph came in on drums when touring beyond Toronto became part of the picture. That shift changed the sound, too. What began as something in the studio had to become something that could work onstage.”
That transition from recording project to touring band pushed the sound outward. Nolan said the electronic elements, present in nearly every track, take on a different life when the band plays live.
“Pretty much every song has some electronic component running through it, and live that becomes really notable because Sophia is scratching, manipulating samples and interacting with those sounds in real time,” he said. “It changes from show to show, so every performance is unique.”
Lyrically, the band draws from city life. “We’re city people, and a lot of the songs come out of living in that environment,” Nolan said. “The general angst of what is happening in the world right now seeps into the lyrics. It’s impossible to avoid.”
Anita said the songs’ directness reflects who they are.
That openness connects to the twee pop label the band has come to accept, if not quite adopt. “We didn’t start out trying to be a ‘twee band,’” Anita said. “It was a label other people gave us, and then we realized it did fit in some ways.” For Sophia, the term points at something genuine. “To me, it means earnest. Honest. Maybe a little naive in a good way.”
The songwriting is a shared process that shifts from track to track. Nolan typically builds the demo and the backing beat, and the song finds its voice from there. “A lot of it depends on what each person is playing,” Anita said. “Sometimes the guitar or bass part is too complicated to sing to, so someone else takes the lead. We all have different instincts and influences, and that mix is a big part of the band.”
Live, the band is comfortable with a little uncertainty on stage. “I think people enjoy watching us because they don’t totally know what to expect,” Sophia said.
For anyone still deciding whether to make the trip to Soda Bar, Anita has a simple pitch. “San Diego is very far from Toronto, so if people want a taste of the city that formed us, come check us out.”
Nolan is just as direct: “I think we’re doing something new. We’re not just rehashing an old idea.”Todd Benton, or DJ Todd, is a DJ with KNSJ 89.1 FM, a community-funded, volunteer-run radio station.
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