Biography
Hailing from Regina, Saskatchewan, Library Voices formed in 2008 as a Canadian seven-piece indie pop outfit. A circle of friends gathered an array of instruments inside the city’s SoulSound Studios—once a funeral home—and laid down their opening EP, Hunting Ghosts & Other Collected Shorts. The band’s offbeat, tuneful pop immediately attracted attention, earning mentions in Spin and The New Yorker along with a 2009 Independent Album of the Year nomination at the Western Canadian Music Awards. Before their first full-length appeared, the musicians suffered two successive setbacks: after a Vancouver show their gear was stolen, and shortly afterward replacement equipment was destroyed by flooding, which helped cement their image as a group acquainted with adversity. Issued in 2010 on the Regina-based indie Young Soul Records, Denim on Denim revealed Library Voices’ growing command of hook-driven, idiosyncratic pop. A subsequent agreement with the international imprint Nevado Music allowed a wider release for the follow-up, the colorful 2011 album Summer of Lust. Further misfortune arrived before the next recording when, during a Regina pub crawl marking bassist Eion Hickey-Cameron’s bachelor party, frontman Carl Johnson and Hickey-Cameron were attacked; Johnson lost consciousness and sustained mild brain damage. The ensemble persisted, Johnson regained his health—though his sense of smell remained impaired—and in 2014 they issued the mid-fi, fuzzed-out EP For John. Their third album, Lovish, arrived in late 2015 and found the group advancing along a louder, more distorted pop trajectory.