Kevin Drew doesn’t sell the myth so much as shrug at it. Broken Social Scene is supposed to be the Canadian hydra too large to move, the friend group that got famous for not fitting into a band-shaped box, the kitchen party that spilled into the living room and never really left. On Hug of Thunder, their 2017 return, he made it sound suspiciously simple: “We slowly had to find our way back… get everyone on board without pushing… and just slowly get back into each other’s lives while creating melodies we knew so well.” Memory muscle, he called it. The thing you don’t think about until it flexes and you’re back where you started, only wiser and with better snacks.
The process looked like a lake house fantasy because it kind of was. They decamped to the Bathhouse—by the lake, by the pool, with enough kitchen time to qualify for squatters’ rights. People drifted in and out, sat down, and Kevin or Brendan would say, “Here’s a bunch of ideas.” The horn section rolled through for six days like a benevolent biker gang: this one, not that one, okay now this. It was trust disguised as scheduling. “You just give people time and treat them to find what they’re looking for melodically within what you’ve already made,” Drew said. “You have so much history with everybody that you always know you’re gonna land.” Which is the real trick of this band. They make chaos look like a plan.
For a collective with a half-dozen front-people, it’s funny how often they end up singing the same song. Not literally—though they love a gang-chorus—but thematically. “We found ourselves in the same sort of spot in life,” Drew said. Leslie Feist personalizes the title track as a young woman’s story; elsewhere it’s social commentary, the struggle to keep moving and hold on while the world tries not to. Nobody called a meeting. They just lined up. “If you spend enough time together,” he said, “you’re just gonna line up to what the quest’s about.” It’s less a manifesto than the natural outcome of kitchen proximity.
The timeline matters because the world intruded like it always does. The shorthand is that Paris pulled them back together; Drew is careful with that narrative. “Everyone has their own opinion,” he said. “I don’t want that to be the point.” What it did was speed the momentum that was already there: friends unhappy on their separate islands, wanting back in the room, wanting to feel a crowd decide this is still worth doing. They returned as an anthemic band that insists on being in the room with you, not above you. Then, on the very first real tour back, Manchester happened. They landed, checked their phones, and watched horror roll across a town getting dressed for a night out. They went to the vigil. They waited to hear if the show would go on. It did.
“Being in that energy is something none of us had experienced,” Drew said. “It wipes away all the unnecessary.” Johnny Marr joined them at the Albert Hall—planned in the calendar, unthinkable in the context—after texting doubts and then watching his city rise up. They opened with “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl.” Drew’s dad was in the audience. You don’t write that scene; you say thank you and play. “There’s no place we’d rather be than here tonight,” he told them, and for once it wasn’t stagecraft. Sometimes the most political thing you can do is show up and mean it.
Back at the lake, the songs eloped. Hug of Thunder feels like a mixtape written by people who keep finishing each other’s sentences, but “Skyline” is the one that lays out the wiring in plain sight. It’s mantra-pop, a circle that tightens until you can’t imagine it ever being straight. “There’s something very beautiful about repetition and mantras within music,” Drew said. Sean Everett’s mix pushes it toward a tipsy breakdown—the MonY MonY wobble that turns a room into one organism. A few chords, a few sentences, and suddenly it’s not so simple. “Sometimes you don’t need much,” Drew said. “You repeat things for them to register.” It’s his love letter to Toronto, to the women in his life, to the ghosts on certain corners. You don’t clock the repetition until halfway through because you’re busy feeling it. The onion peels because the knife is a hook.
None of this works without the obvious thing bands pretend isn’t the engine: friendship. Drew repeats the word like a spell. The kitchen is the center of the universe; the pool is optional; the chorus is mandatory. Broken Social Scene is a party where the invitations are also assignments. People arrive with history, leave with a horn line, and try not to trip over the extension cords. “Make it about the real purpose in the first place,” he said. “Friendship. Through that you find the song.” It’s sappy until the drums hit and you realize they mean it.
The cynic’s counterargument is that collectives age into bureaucracy and nostalgia. Hug of Thunder didn’t. It landed like a reminder that you can grow up and still throw punches in the chorus. The lyricists didn’t align because a calendar meeting said so; they aligned because the same world squeezed them at the same angle, and they answered in harmony out of habit. They’re still a room band, which is why they were the right band for the wrong nights in Manchester and anywhere else people needed noise to feel like a plan.
At the end of our chat, Drew turned the Canadian gratitude up to eleven. Thank you for playing it, thank you for the support, thank you for helping us return. He sounded like a man who’d just hauled an anvil back onto a stage and discovered it was lighter than he remembered. I said something mushy about knocking it out of the park. He laughed and signed my yearbook the only way that made sense: “Have a great summer. Stay the same. Never change.” The band didn’t listen, thank God. They changed just enough to sound like themselves again.
Listen to the interview above and then check out "Skyline" below!
