Fur Trade Announce New Record Dark Celebration; Release Dazzling Video For
“Signature Moves”
Illustrious pop-twisting duo Fur Trade – the ambitious collaboration between four-time JUNO nominee Steve Bays and Parker Bossley – are excited to announce their new LP Dark Celebration, a ten-song tell-all of happiness and heartbreak to be released September 22 via their new label home, Light Organ Records. Alongside the LP announcement, the band shares a new single and video for “Signature Moves”, an infectious track that unveils its intricate design layer by layer as it builds to an explosive dance chorus.“Signature Moves” joins the previously shared indie-sleaze glam rock “LOL Trash”, and 80s city pop anthem “Make it to the Morning”.
“Like many of the songs on this record, we wrote Signature Moves between sunset and sunrise,” explains Bay and Bossley. “It encapsulates our misplaced FOMO and phantom nostalgia for NYC underground club culture in the early 80s. We had the film ‘Paris is Burning’ on loop in the background while writing and recording and felt a connection with the dancers and designers at those wild drag balls. We’re from a different world of course, but we still relate to that feeling of hiding in the cracks of a bubbling underground scene where you know will be understood and appreciated, while openly fantasizing of being superstars, and simultaneously sardonically paying homage to the surrounding gauche luxury culture of a city being rapidly gentrified.”
Fur Trade worked meticulously polishing the production and getting every single piece just right. They even recreated the first 8 bars of the Twin Peaks theme song and used one second of it, to perfectly introduce the chorus.
The first collaborative full-length effort from the duo in nearly ten years, Dark Celebration is a get-together of shredded neon guitar-monies, gothic organ whirls, tropical disco vibes, and the free-flowing four-on-the-floors of “indie-club tracks with an arty twist”. While tapping into a wellspring of sonic inspiration — think Yellow Magic Orchestra, Dirty Projectors, Yumi Matsutoya, Hall & Oates, and Phoenix — Dark Celebration instantly becomes Fur Trade through signature moves like Bays’ familiar weighty croon, or Bossley’s slinky, bass-forward bump.
“The album traverses through peaks and valleys — a lot of happiness and heartbreak — but it ends with this message of peace: this one’s for when you see the world for what it is and could be,” Bossley explains.
The album’s opening “Monaco” finds Bays singing about writer’s block, perhaps speaking to the decade-long gap between Fur Trade’s 2013 self-titled debut and this sophomore follow-up. That’s not to say Bays and Bossley have been out of the game, entirely. Both musicians have spent the in-between times working steadily through various projects (Bays through supergroups Mounties and Left Field Messiah; Bossley with The Gay Nineties; and both as members of the venerated Hot Hot Heat), while also developing their studio chops behind the scenes with the likes of Said the Whale, Steve Aoki, Diplo, Fitz and the Tantrums, Hotel Mira, Sleepy Tom, and more. Occasionally, they’d invite each other onto outside sessions taking place at their respective Tugboat Pl and Jam Florist studios in Vancouver. But as Fur Trade became increasingly backburnered, Bays and Bossley wondered whether this specific creative outlet would forever be limited to “Friday nights with a box of wine.”
“It felt like for most of those ten years, Fur Trade was just a vanity project that might die on a hard drive, sadly,” Bays explains, though Bossley counters this with an optimistic, “For me it was less ‘Is this going to come out?’ but ‘When is this going to come out?’”
Truthfully, you can’t force great art (“The more I think, the less that I create,” Bossley sings poignantly at one point on the album). Though they’d been sitting on versions of an album for the better part of a decade, the turning point came during the all-night creative spurt in 2022 that yielded Dark Celebration’s first single, “LOL Trash”. A playfully sleazy, post-breakup anthem, “LOL Trash” is “about going out on the town and trying to distract yourself by looking for a new person”. While thematically anchored in “dodging self-analysis,” the track became a cathartic breakthrough for Fur Trade, propelling the duo towards crafting a collection hinging on real-life-and-imagined scenarios of existential angst, imploded relationships, wedding day meltdowns, and the feat of living through the pandemic. But sonically, they contrast Dark Celebration’s dourest mindscapes with undeniably surefooted melodies.
“We felt like we were allowed to add all these dark elements, lyrically, because at the end of the day it’s such a catchy record,” Bays admits.
Fur Trade is locked to headline a special DJ performance at the Light Organ Records Summer Sipper Party at the Painted Ship in Vancouver on July 22 featuring special guest Johnny Payne. Find more information and tickets here.