The soundtrack to this winter, for me, has been the electronic group Junior Boys’ excellent new album Big Black Coat. This means I’m propagating a cliché. Ever since their 2003 debut Last Exit, the many warm reviews for the Canadian band’s songs have overused adjectives about cold: “icy,” “chilly,” “wintry.”
This phenomenon should persist for Big Black Coat, Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus’s first album in five years. The height of Junior Boys’ acclaim came around 2006’s So This Is Goodbye, whose songs—including the new indie classic “In the Morning”—drew comparisons to Depeche Mode and other ’80s synth-poppers. Big Black Coat, though, excavates more underground traditions—Detroit techno, industrial dance music, the early days of drum-machine-backed disco—as its songs spool out patient, hypnotic rhythms rendered in high-hat hisses that sometimes, yes, sound like ice being chipped. One track, “C’mon Baby,” ends in a glorious cloud of static and synthetic pinging that makes me visualize a ship passing a glacier at night. Another, “No One’s Business,” has a slowly swirling arrangement that makes the singing easier and harder to hear at different times; the effect is like a voice calling out in a blizzard. Ugh to these descriptions right?
I wanted to speak with Greenspan to figure out whether the frigid imagery commonly surrounding his music results from his own intentions, or whether he’s annoyed at the fact that his unapologetically mechanical songs keeps getting compared to the weather. Happily, he was cool about it. “I cultivate it to some extent,” he said of the winter theme.
In fact, Big Black Coat is something of an accidental concept album about the struggles of people in his hometown of Hamilton, Canada, a postindustrial city on the banks of Lake Ontario. This explains the desperation and yearning in these songs, as well as the temperature.
Big Black Coat is available February 4th, though it’s currently streaming on NPR.