Ivytide Announce portable darkroom LP out April 5 with Release Show in Montreal on June 1
Anticipation builds for Ivytide’s full-length debut album, portable darkroom, which the indie pop band announces will be released on April 5, followed by a celebratory show in Montreal at Fairmount Theatre on June 1. With already more than 7 million streams under their belt alongside a European tour and sold-out venues across Québec and Ontario, their mutual love for indie music inspires a self-produced brand of bedroom pop songs with intricate, catchy melodies, which float on top of well-thought-out instrumentation.
Their newest single “doc martens” encapsulates the feeling of being on the move, not knowing what’s to come. Whether running from home or from an overwhelming situation, the uncertainty and excitement of what the future holds can help one stay afloat. Ivytide captures this adventure of staying on the run by blending their signature with distorted guitars, upbeat drums, and ambient sounds of transport.
It’s accompanied by a Super 8 music video of the band touring Europe and Canada.
“We do not recollect our memories in a pure way. Rather, when we reconstruct them in our minds, our ‘portable darkroom,’ they are filled with artifacts, blemishes and impurities, like a photograph from a film camera gaining its color,” the band states.
As the 12 songs develop, portable darkroom provides an aperture into their emotions, experiences, and memories, pulling on the depths of vulnerability, loss, and instability with captivating soulful vocals. The record showcases Ivytide’s signature indie pop stylings, infused with idiosyncratic elements from cabins across Québec (the band’s physical darkrooms), inviting listeners into the dwellings where the album was written and produced. An eclectic body of work, portable darkroom includes upbeat unapologetic earworms, alongside emotional indie-folk offerings, as Ivytide stakes its claim to a broader and more mature musical landscape. In addition to their work in Ivytide, singer Nathan Gagné and guitarist Jamie Snytte are currently completing graduate studies in clinical psychology. Their research is focused on the neural underpinnings of memory and music processing. Both their research backgrounds and clinical experience have bled into the themes of their music – touching on mental health struggles where rumination, worry, and biased thinking run amok.