Over the course of 18 years, Canada’s cosmic explorers have set the controls for the heart of sun. Returning after a five-year gap, the story of their current album is one of artistic vision and a lack of compromise. But now we ask the big question: how prog are The Besnard Lakes?

Words: Julian Marszalek

PRESS/JOSEPH YARMUSH

Jace Lasek – singer, guitarist and producer of Canadian space cadets The Besnard Lakes – turns to his bassist, co-vocalist and wife, Olga Goreas, as the pair burst into gales of laughter. It’s been five long years since the band’s last album, A Coliseum Complex Museum, so while it’s not unreasonable to ask where the hell they’ve been for all that time, the couple happily dismiss the notion they’ve had their feet up for longer than has been necessary.

“We’ve used our time constructively,” counters Lasek. “When we finished making the last record, we did some touring and that record came out in 2016. We put out an EP [The Besnard Lakes Are The Divine Wind] in 2017 and then parted ways with our label, Jagjaguwar. At that point we were like, ‘Oh, we’ve made a bunch of records and we’ve had some fun and maybe we’re done and that’s it? Let’s take a break and see which way the chips fall and we’ll see what happens.’”

“We courted over Yes albums. Olga’s a huge Rush fan, too, and I’m a medium Rush fan. But at that point in my life, I’d never met a girl who was into prog rock, so I thought, ‘I’m going to marry you!’”

Jace Lasek

New album TheBesnard LakesAreTheLastOf TheGreatThunderstorm Warnings.

The band around the time of AColiseum ComplexMuseum.

PRESS/THE BESNARD LAKES

He continues: “We were going through some stuff one day and we realised we had a huge backlog of all these unfinished songs, so we were like, ‘Let’s just make a new album.’ We weren’t under any pressure to do it because we didn’t have a label, so it felt like going back to our early days when we were making our first records and trying to get people interested.”