Toronto’s Alt-Rockers The Drifts Explore Tumultuous Love with “Breaking Every Bone”
If you’ve ever really lived, then at some point, you’ve had one of those wildly tumultuous relationships where you can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. Toronto-based alt-rockers The Drifts capture such a bittersweet, intoxicating situation with their shimmery-and-shadowy new single “Breaking Every Bone.”
Featuring a dark, grungy bassline under glittering guitar, “Breaking Every Bone” explores the layers of an on-and-off relationship as singer Alyssa Holmes alternates between a near-whisper and a stadium wail. “It’s just so easy to crawl back to you/ I always stumble and fall back to you,” she confesses, and then the song builds and dissolves over the chorus:
“I’ve been breaking every bone in my body
Trying to write a love song
You think you get to know somebody
You get it all wrong
Giving me a run for my money been running too long”
The corresponding music video captures the band performing in the middle of the Joshua Tree desert during the golden hour.
“The song has a fierce and raw feel that seems incredibly fitting with the desert,” said Holmes. “We shot a raw performance video at dusk in Pioneer town, and loved the simple and honest feel it gave.”
Co-written with JUNO-winning rock band the Monowhales, “Breaking Every Bone” developed as Holmes and her bandmate Sam Nyberg strove to elaborate on their collaborators’ initial lyric of “I’m breaking every bone in my body/ Trying to write a love song.”
“For such a happy person, I tend to write darker lyrics,” Holmes said. “That lyric and that melody made the rest so effortless. ‘Breaking Every Bone’ is a song that gets right to the point: How am I supposed to write a love song if I can’t stand you?”
The song, included on The Drifts’ new EP, expands on the theme of their first album Traces, which focused entirely on falling out of love.
“This EP, and specifically this single, feels like it is dedicated to the in-between,” Holmes said. “The moving forward and trying to find what you had once again, but with all the struggles and baggage that now come along with it.”
Watch the video for “Breaking Every Bone” below and learn more about The Drifts via our mini-interview.
Care to introduce yourself?
We are Binod and Alyssa from The Drifts, a band based out of Toronto making bold, powerful, and gritty rock music.
Tell us about the process of writing “Breaking Every Bone.”
A lot of our songs start with a guitar and a notepad. In this case, our guitarist Sam was hanging with some friends, another Toronto band Monowhales, and they pitched the main lyric. From there, we jammed on the idea and sculpted “breaking every bone” into what it is. I think we ended up with this slow build for the song because of the unique nature of the title lyric. We found that it sort of had to be sung in this gentler way at first in order to feel honest, and then at the end it makes it so much more powerful when the line has some force behind it.
What’s it like being a musician in Toronto?
Binod: It’s cool most of the time, as a musician, there’s always that contrast where you have to sort of isolate and grind and hone your skills, and then go out and socialize and really show what you can do. Toronto is pretty great for that, and people are hungry for music. I would hope we can add more local-scene-level venues and take advantage of that more.
Who was the first Canadian artist to blow you away?
Binod: It’d have to be Neil Young for me. Growing up, classic rock radio and everything he was involved with had a huge impression on me.
Alyssa: Surely for me, it included our powerhouse female singers and songwriters like Joni, Alanis, Shania, and Sarah Mclachlan. These female voices mixed with my love of ’60s and ’70s rock and roll really played a huge part in the music I create now.