With over 8 million streams under their belt, Ivytide have unveiled their full-length debut album, portable darkroom, on Indica Records. 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 their claim to a broader and more mature musical landscape.
The focus track, “vacant” leaves nothing at the door, delving into feelings of patience and self-reflection. Learning to carry personal luggage takes both time and introspection, yet the focus track’s uplifting feel hints at the protagonist’s moment of self-realization, choosing to leave his baggage outside where “rain will catch it.” The juxtaposition between the song’s rapped verses and falsetto choruses portrays the thoughtful disarray the protagonist finds himself in.
“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. 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.