Julie And The Wrong Guys

In 2011, celebrated Juno-award winning songwriter Julie Doiron enlisted Mike Peters and Jaye Schwarzer—known best for their long-time tenure in Toronto’s metal/hardcore heavyweights Cancer Bats—to fill in some shows on drums and bass, inviting countrymeets- punk troubadour Eamon McGrath to round out the sound on fuzzed-out guitar. High profile tours of Ontario, Quebec and the East Coast soon followed. Flash forward to October 2016, where Julie & The Wrong Guys holed themselves up in a cabin in the serene Manitoba wilderness near Red Rock Lake. With daily life temporarily an afterthought, the group shifted all focus to crafting the songs that would eventually become their self-titled debut, pouring themselves over the music from sun-up, until the waning hours of the fading night. The songs are the perfect amalgamation of all the Wrong Guys’ respective projects: on standout tracks like “Farther From You” and “Call My Own Shots”, the tender, lyrically evocative, and delicate songwriting of Canadian indie rock godmother Julie Doiron crashes headfirst with the pummeling volume provided by Mike Peters, Jaye Schwarzer, and Eamon McGrath. Doiron also returns to her full-throttle, early-90s grunge and punk rock roots on ragers like “Wanted What I Wanted” and “Calm Before the Storm”. The record is the sum of its parts: the four members of Julie & The Wrong Guys have spent the better parts of their careers carving up van wheels in their own, vastly different musical projects. Working together, however, they’ve found a distinctly harmonized voice that weaves through and acknowledges the vast array of influences across their musical backgrounds, paying obvious homage to the music that drove these four unlikely collaborators together; but with each member approaching the material with their own very literal insight of endless days out across the highways of world, they’ve come out of the woods with one of the most exciting and jaw-dropping debut records of the year.