Spencer Krug

Spencer Krug, a Canadian multi-instrumentalist who writes and performs songs, has built a reputation for producing intense, vividly imagined independent rock. Although membership in Wolf Parade, the group assembled in Montreal, accounts for much of his visibility, he has sustained a singular presence for twenty years through an array of other projects such as Sunset Rubdown and Moonface, each marked by a persistent focus on melody and layered textures delivered in an idiosyncratic manner. After issuing the last Moonface album, 2018’s This One’s for the Dancer & This One’s for the Dancer’s Bouquet, he stated that all future solo material would appear under his own name. The 2021 release Fading Graffiti, saturated with pedal steel, demonstrated that he had kept his word.

Krug entered the world in 1977 in Penticton, British Columbia, and acquired piano skills on his own before teaching himself guitar during his teenage years. Following a move to Victoria, he started Frog Eyes with roommate Carey Mercer, though his participation ended after the band’s 2002 debut long-player, The Bloody Hand. He next relocated to Montreal to attend Concordia University, where he co-founded Wolf Parade with Dan Boeckner in 2003. That same year the band supported an early incarnation of Arcade Fire ahead of Funeral, and in 2005 they delivered the widely praised Sub Pop album Apologies to the Queen Mary. During this stretch he also launched Sunset Rubdown and played on the sole, entirely instrumental album by Fifths of Seven alongside Beckie Foon and Rachel Levine.

In 2006 he rejoined Frog Eyes for two further releases and formed the indie supergroup Swan Lake with Dan Bejar of Destroyer and Mercer. The trio’s Jagjaguwar debut, Beast Moans, appeared that year, followed in 2009 by the more approachable Enemy Mine; the band then disbanded. Sunset Rubdown likewise wound down, yet Krug withheld confirmation until 2012, the year he moved to Helsinki and placed Wolf Parade on hold.

Moonface debuted in 2010 and remained his principal outlet for most of the decade. Much of the project’s catalog was recorded in tandem with Siinai, both before and after Krug left Finland in 2014. Within a few years of his return to Canada, Wolf Parade resumed activity, first with a self-titled EP and then with two additional Sub Pop albums, Cry Cry Cry in 2017 and Thin Mind in 2020. The final Moonface record also ended his intermittent thirteen-year relationship with Jagjaguwar. Dissatisfied with the conventional schedule that routinely imposed a twelve-month interval between completion and release, he adopted a direct-to-consumer model in 2019, granting paying listeners access to new songs within hours. Early piano sketches of material that would become Fading Graffiti first surfaced through this service. The finished album reached wider audiences in April 2021 on his own Pronounced Kroog label.