Foxwarren at The Bellwether

Canadian quintet Foxwarren is Andy Shauf, Avery and Darryl Kissick, Dallas Bryson, and Colin Nealis. Their new album, 2. 2 is a fun and surprising record, where boundaries between genre and song are constantly blurred. Built on 20 years of friendship, Foxwarren ostensibly plays folk music, where warm tones and cantering rhythms buoy songs of characters wrestling with existential quandaries inside of twilit vocals. But after touring their lauded, Juno Award-nominated, 2018 self-titled debut, Foxwarren decided to do it all differently, eventually dropping the familiar band-in-a-room routine to instead plug those songs, and various other sounds into a sampler to create 2. In their own home studios across four provinces, all five members would upload song ideas, melodic phrases, or rhythmic bits to a shared folder. In Toronto, Shauf would then plug these into a sampler and construct songs from the fragments supplied by his bandmates, leaning into classic hip-hop techniques and musique concrète alike as unlikely lodestars. Foxwarren would convene at weekly online meetings, offering long distance suggestions about which way a song might shift.

The result is mesmerizing and uncanny, an album that traces two sides of a relationship through 37 minutes of collage art.