Music

Victoria B.C. post-punks Freak Heat Waves gave us a tour of their hometown

by Mark Teo

Along with their one-time tourmates in Viet Cong, we’ve long considered Freak Heat Waves one of Canada’s best kraut-tinged acts. (We liked ’em so much, in fact, that we namechecked ’em in our list of favourite Canadian post-punk bands.) It’s fitting, then, that both Western Canadian acts made bold moves in the early months of 2015: Viet Cong, for their part, unveiled their towering, ice-cold debut in January. Freak Heat Waves, meanwhile, are gearing up for the February release of Bonnie’s State of Mind via Hockey Dad Records—and it’s an audible leap forward for the Victoria-bred trio.

The first thing that leaps out about Bonnie’s State of Mind? It ain’t a by-the-numbers krautrock album. Rather, when we catch up with guitarist Steven Lind and drummer and drummer Thomas Di Ninno, they don’t even describe it as an album at all: Rather, they’d prefer to think of it as a mixtape. “I think of it as a bunch of different bands going for the same sound, but with different instruments at their disposal,” says Lind.

“We knew that it would be more of a sound collage, less of a recording of our live set,” adds Di Ninno. “We knew it was going to be more of a sound collage, something that incorporated a lot of different genre influences and styles.”

And Bonnie’s State of Mind delivers on Di Ninno’s promise. While Freak Heat Waves certainly use wiry post-punk as an anchor—the LP’s midsection, in particular, is a tangle of spidery guitars and off-kilter drums—it often veers into unpredictable directions: Sometimes, the band flirts with machine music, and it’s not hard to hear bits of Techno Pop-era Kraftwerk in Bonnie’s State of Mind‘s title track. Elsewhere, the band flirts with future-pop—it’s not hard to hear Gary Numan’s disembodied voice in tracks like the excellent “Design of Success,” or a “Civil Servant,” tracks that exhibit Freak Heat Waves’ dystopic tendencies.

“Thematically,” Di Ninno adds, “We wanted to be [like] a sci-fi horror movie but in an album format. We wanted the whole thing to be a ride from start to finish, and we wanted to the songs to fade into each other, with a lot of cross-fading.”

Yet even when Freak Heat Waves throws siren-like horns or French-language dialogue into the mix, Bonnie’s State of Mind feels remarkably cohesive. Surprising, considering how the LP came together: Di Ninno and Lind say the band recorded sessions in Calgary, but completed the album on an 18-acre plot on Pender Island, a remote island off the B.C. coast. They wrote songs during their downtime, but flushed them out on tour. Some parts were written live, others in studio.

In short: The band had a lot of ideas, and Bonnie’s State of Mind required a lot of editing. “It was kind of a weird journey,” says Lind. “It took us so many sessions and so many different stages. There were a lot of situations where we couldn’t play as a full band, or had a couple of instruments at our disposal. There were lots of diffferent points where we thought we were going to make a certain type of album, [but it ended up being] this shit-show of different genre influences.”

“It’d been a while since we released anything,” adds Di Ninno, “so we wanted to incorporate all of the stuff we wanted to on the album.”

But while Bonnie’s State of Mind was recorded on Pender Island, it’ll get a proper release at a homecoming show in Victoria—and in anticipation of the album’s release, we got Freak Heat Waves to give us a tour of their hometown. Check it in the gallery above.