Winnipeg’s Living Hour Control the Chaos

“I was thinking a lot about how anxiety and thoughts exist in your body and in the small decisions you make everyday and in what you see in the world,” Sarty says over the phone from her grandfather's house on Vancouver Island. “Your whole life is based on your perception of what you’re seeing. Then I thought about how anxiety and busy thoughts color that and affect it and change your whole life. When I’m feeling really extreme, I think, ‘Oh yeah, you could just die because a bee would buzz into your face and you’d freak out and fall off a cliff or something.’”

A typical response to existential dread is often grasping for control. On Internal Drone Infinity, this manifests in Living Hour’s gravitation toward precision in the midst of turbulence—in moments like the spiralling outro of “Wheel” or the feedback-heavy ease-in to “Big Shadow,” it’s as if the band has simply figured out how to put their hands around noise and turmoil and shape them to their whim. This move toward punchiness and away from the gentler, gauzier sounds of 2022’s Someday Is Today could be attributed to a number of things—the scientific rigor with which guitarists Gil Carroll and Adam Soloway tend to their tones, Sarty’s writing more guitar parts, or Carroll’s shift from mostly clean sounds to incorporating fuzz, distortion, and overdrive. (“Swiss army knife” multi-instrumentalist Brett Ticzon also handles a few guitar details, while drummer Isaac Tate plays one upside down on “Big Shadow”).

“We were kind of inspired by the band Superheaven, who I’m sure play their guitars through these massive stacks and get huge, huge guitar chord tones,” Soloway says. “But we were still working with our little amps, so we would be recording six different guitars doing different versions of a chord to try to make it sound as huge as possible, stacking them on top of each other.”