On the frontlines of the early-2000s Montreal indie-rock insurgency, The Dears presented themselves as lovers and fighters, with the group’s magnetic frontman, Murray Lightburn, singing of doomed romance and imminent apocalypse with the same cardiac-arresting urgency. With their 2003 breakthrough No Cities Left and its 2006 Polaris Music Prize-nominated follow-up Gang of Losers, The Dears established a uniquely expansive musical universe—while there is no lack of indie bands drawn to the forlorn poeticism of The Smiths, few would dare to complement it with the seductive symphonic funk of Serge Gainsbourg and the interstellar art rock of Pink Floyd. Since then, numerous line-up changes have sent the band spinning off into myriad directions, with Lightburn and his keyboardist wife Natalia Yanchak steadily guiding The Dears through sprawling studio-driven experiments (2008’s Missiles) and punchy rock anthems (2011’s Degeneration Street) and back again. But for all the turbulence the duo have endured within and without the group, Lightburn’s force-of-nature howl and dogged sense of hope forever serve as The Dears’ sturdy emotional anchors. As you immerse yourself in The Dears’ most momentous tracks, Lightburn shares the stories behind five crucial evolutionary cuts. Acoustic Guitar Phase “When we made the Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique EP, it was the first time we were aware that, ‘Oh, someone is actually going to hear this.’ Like, I was doing interviews in the studio when we were mixing it—there was a level of anticipation for it, even if it was on a small scale. With a lot of our earlier stuff, I didn't have a lot of tools at my disposal. I had a borrowed acoustic guitar in my apartment, and that's how a lot of those early songs were written. I guess you could call that EP the end of my acoustic guitar phase!” We Can Have It “I suppose you could say ‘Lost in the Plot’ defines a lot about this period of the band, especially in Canada, because it was pretty much the only song of ours that got played on radio. And it’s still our No. 1 song in streams. So on the surface, it’s the most significant song on No Cities Left, but for me, ‘We Can Have It’ is very definitive, mostly because I was told by an A&R guy that it wasn’t really a song song, it was a poem song. At that point in our career, an A&R guy telling you that felt like things could go one way or the other—it could wreck your path or it could straighten your path as a writer. So I chose to embrace the poem-song side of things, because that’s what this song was: It was modelled after the psalms from David in the Bible. As a kid, when I found out that the psalms were actually songs that David wrote, I would try to imagine the music that would go with them, and there was a person in our church when I was growing up who actually bought a $3,000 guitar and could only play two chords, and he decided to just play the same two chords and sing the psalms. It was incredible: He was just singing run-on sentences on top of two chords. I remembered all of that when I was writing 'We Can Have It', so when that A&R guy said it was a poem song, I was like, ‘Well, he's right—and I'm going to own it.’” Whites Only Party “This song was based on a theory I had that only one black rock person can exist in the same space in a given time. When Bloc Party came along, we started to get swept aside, and then TV on the Radio came along and then Bloc Party got swept aside, and then I forget who came after TV on the Radio, but they got swept aside too. And then rap got really big, and then we all can’t even get in there now. I just thought it was funny. It was like a Star Trek episode where the same matter can’t occupy the same space.” Disclaimer “I remember spending three hours on the effects being used on the drum machine and just ruining lives in the studio. I felt bad for the engineer just sitting there while I turned knobs and recording the track over and over and over and over and over. I would never do that now, and I never did that before. I was just in full sonic-experimentation mode. We spent nine weeks at Studio Plateau doing that every day, turning knobs in every direction and exploring. What I'm most grateful for about this song is it's the last time I was able to get my old man to play saxophone on a record, so I'm really glad that his work is forever preserved in that.” Thrones “This song was a mash-up between something [former Thrush Hermit member/occasional Dears guitarist] Rob Benvie was working on and something I was working on. His vibe was more refined than what I had going, so I just plopped what I was working with on top of his stuff, and it just went from there. lt's not like Rob would bring us a lot of stuff, but when he brought something, it was quite substantial and had weight. And this was one of those collabs that was successful in a meaningful way.”