Things certainly are good in the world of Wintersleep these days. The Montreal-via Halifax based band’s previous record Welcome To The Night Sky was critically lauded here in Canada and abroad while the band undertook tours with groups such as Wolf Parade, The Tragically Hip and Editors. Wintersleep’s excellent new record New Inheritors is in stores now and stands to expose them an even larger audience than the band is already playing to these days.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I did recently speak with Wintersleep drummer extraordinaire Loel Campbell as the band was en route to some promotional activities in Toronto. My chat with Loel went rather well but once I returned to my voice recorder to write this very story, I realized that I had neglected to turn the damn thing on. Whoops.
Ironically, at the conclusion of our conversation, Campbell invited me to call him back should I need anything else in the way of information to complete my piece. Very courteous of him to offer, without a doubt. The only hitch there is that I don’t have Campbell’s phone number – his record label patched our conversation together. Plus I wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable calling him back and saying “Hey Loel. Could you just repeat everything we talked about today?!”
So, seeing how I am lacking verbatim quotes from Campbell and do not feel comfortable attributing quotes to the drummer which I am pulling from my memory, here is what I can tell you that we covered off:
Since 2007’s Welcome To The Night Sky, Campbell told me that everything fell into place rather nicely when it came to the making of New Inheritors. Their new record is the first to feature members Mike Bigelow and Jon Samuel even though both members joined the band while the group was promoting their last album.
Some of the material found on New Inheritors was born on the endless touring road that Wintersleep knows all too well. Although the group has no aversion to writing while on the road, Campbell says the band did decamp to “rural Nova Scotia” for a period of time to ensure that the ideas that the group had come up with were worthy of further consideration.
Wintersleep has select Canadian tour dates dotting their calendar over the next few months however one look at the tour schedule listed on their website reveals an American-heavy touring schedule and with good reason:
The group is independently releasing New Inheritors south of the border on June 1 with backing from a promotion “juggernaut” as Campbell’s band mate Paul Murphy calls it. Campbell clarifies that the team the band has in place to help promote the group to US audiences arose from various connections that the band has formed over the years. And while it never hurts to have a good promotion team in your back pocket, touring is perhaps a more essential piece of the puzzle, Campbell said.
For more information on Wintersleep and where you can catch them live, check out their website at www.wintersleep.com. In addition to being able to view the video for first single “Black Camera”, the band is also offering a free download of the New Inheritors title track for the paltry price of your email address.