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Music

Keep Believing in Anything: Wolf Parade Staged the Perfect Comeback

The Canadian indie rock darlings played their first show in five years at New York's Bowery Ballroom last night and handled the return in style.

Dan Boeckner / Photos by Matt Seger

The first words spoken by Spencer Krug, the Synth Guy in Wolf Parade, onstage last night at New York’s Bowery Ballroom were as follows: “Hey.” Hey Wolf Parade! You guys! As Dan Boeckner, the Guitar Guy in Wolf Parade, pointed out, “it’s been a while.” He added, to the audience, “you look good. Me, I’ve been good.”

And then back into it, guitars windmilling through clanging synthesizer lines, whole squad spazzing and commanding the hell out of the stage. On the International Fanfare Index, often used to rate such events, it registered a score of Exactly the Right Amount. Just a real good amount of fanfare, with the riffs to back it up.

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The band reunion is a big business in 2016: In the crowded competition for attention, what better way to get some than to engineer the comeback that no one ever thought would happen? The Misfits, Guns n Roses, LCD Soundsystem (dormant for just five years, even though they made a huge fanfare about going away)—everybody’s hopping back in the game. The list of groups who could pull off a reunion grows shorter, while the trope of doing so becomes a little more played out with each one. Wolf Parade, a band that never technically went away but rather just seemed uninterested in being Wolf Parade for a few years, had no grand never-getting-back-together narrative to accompany them, but every part of their return has been perfectly executed.

Left to right: Krug, DeCaro, Thompson, Boeckner

With their last album, 2010’s Expo 86, Wolf Parade found themselves at a juncture that seems more apparent in hindsight. Their emergence coincided with indie music’s great early-internet-era boom, and their debut album, 2005’s Apologies to the Queen Mary, put them alongside bands like TV on the Radio, New Pornographers, and fellow Montreal scenesters Arcade Fire in exploring the triumphant heights of anthemic but experimental indie rock. Wolf Parade’s cacophonous, ecstatic blend of synthesizer and guitar melodies also predicted the synth-pop driven turn independent music would soon take. Yet as the audiences that might have once been into Wolf Parade moved onto chiller and wavier pastures, following the same hype cycle that made Apologies an instant cult classic, Wolf Parade found their style suddenly outré.

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They were wise to pursue other projects, let indie music cycle through a lo-fi 90s slacker rock revival phase, and allow Expo 86’s distorted, overlooked melodies to percolate. Although this series of shows has been touted as a reunion, taking this much time between projects is pretty normal, and it’s given the band’s strengths time to shine. In the current landscape of safely upbeat pop-rock and safely noncommittal buzz bands, the jagged, unruly songs in Wolf Parade’s catalogue continue to reveal themselves as sharper, more professional compositions than they first appear.

Earlier this year, Wolf Parade announced that they would be reuniting with a series of residencies in New York, Toronto, and London. They weren’t overly cagey about it—Boeckner talked about workshopping new material when Noisey interviewed him in March—and they quietly played a few expectation-stoking practice sets as the mysterious and hilariously named Del Scorcho. Yesterday, just in time for their first show, they dropped a new EP, EP 4, which they also had on sale on vinyl at the venue. And then, most importantly, they took the stage with an excited, assured energy that left no doubt that we were going to get the band at its full potential.

The songs on EP 4, three of which the band played live, are a perfect continuation of where the band left off, fist-pumping anthems about figuring out one’s place in the universe shrouded under instrumental melodies that bounce off each other. There’s a thematic tinge of grappling with technology (perhaps a byproduct of Boeckner’s sci-fi-oriented Operators project and his brief stint living in Silicon Valley, although, as last night’s rendition of “Modern World” suggested, not an entirely new focus for the band), but above all there’s the same sense that’s existed since the beginning of songwriting interested in figuring out how the hell this whole being human thing works. “Blessed be the ones who let their blessings go,” Krug intones on “Mr. Startup,” as usual creating a sort of unsteady mantra.

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Such phrases were in full supply and shouted with vigor last night, as the band ran through a flawless set, drawing mostly from Apologies, which includes the majority of the band’s most single-friendly songs. That album is the kind of debut so formidable that it can become a burden on a sustained career, but Wolf Parade offer a good vision of how artists might avoid that trap, resting confident in the fact that their superior technical chops and natural inclination toward innovation are enough to sustain them. And sure enough, the entire set felt fresh, full of reminders of the band’s ability to write songs that are at once risky and familiar, performed with an electric confidence that only musicians who have been pushing boundaries for a couple decades can achieve.

Near the end of the set, they played “What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way),” which has a lyric that goes “I've got a friend who's a genius / nobody listens to him.” Watching Wolf Parade demolish the stage with practiced ease, playing demonstrably weird-sounding songs, it was tempting to see them as sort of unlistened-to geniuses, guys who approach music and the human world with the same sort of wonky, refracted energy of a band like the Talking Heads. But then they came out and closed with “I’ll Believe in Anything” and the entire room turned into a froth of fans jumping and shouting along, and the idea that people would stop listening to Wolf Parade any time soon seemed suddenly ridiculous.

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Matt Seger shoots photos and videos for VICE. Follow him on Instagram.

Kyle Kramer is an editor at Noisey. Follow him on Twitter.