Stars

The Canadian outfit Stars fuses sugary melodies, male-female vocal harmonies, chamber-pop flourishes, and electronic textures into a signature style that helped shape the indie landscape from the early 2000s forward. Meticulous production and dramatically inclined songwriting marked the group’s output on landmark records such as the 2004 release Set Yourself on Fire, and Stars kept issuing fresh material at irregular intervals in the years that followed. Having continued to develop its approach since those earlier works, the band delivered its ninth studio album, the existentially reflective From Capelton Hill, in 2022.

Stars originated at the tail end of the 1990s after Toronto natives Chris Seligman and Torquil Campbell discovered a shared admiration for refined soul and pop acts including the Smiths, New Order, and Marvin Gaye. The pair captured tracks destined for the debut album Nightsongs while in New York in 1999, enlisting guest appearances by future full-time vocalist Amy Millan and Metric’s Emily Haines, though the project remained studio-only at that stage. Early in the 2000s the lineup coalesced once the musicians moved to Montreal and began performing live; bassist Evan Cranley and drummer Patrick McGee came aboard, Millan committed full-time, and the group turned to fresh songs as Nightsongs appeared in early 2001 on the Le Grand Magistery label. Before 2002 concluded, Stars returned to the studio for a second album. The soft-hued Heart surfaced to critical praise in the U.K. just before Christmas, then reached North American listeners via the Canadian imprint Arts & Crafts in mid-2003. Throughout this period the members pursued numerous side projects: Campbell formed the duo Memphis with longtime friend Chris Dumont, while several Stars contributors, most prominently Millan, also played in Broken Social Scene and supplied vocals to that band’s self-titled 2005 album.

September 2004 brought Stars’ ambitious, theatrical third studio album Set Yourself on Fire. The record became one of the group’s most cherished statements, prompting fellow artists to supply inventive remixes of every track; those reworkings later surfaced on the 2007 collection Do You Trust Your Friends? In July of that same year Stars circumvented potential blog leaks by offering In Our Bedroom After the War as a download two months ahead of its official September street date. The band also launched its own imprint, Soft Revolution, which issued the subsequent studio effort The Five Ghosts in 2010.

After signing with the ATO label, Stars unveiled its sixth album The North during summer 2012. A brighter, more playful set than its immediate predecessors, the upbeat mood persisted two years later on the disco-tinged No One Is Lost. Fronted by the singles “Privilege” and “We Called It Love,” Stars resurfaced in late 2017 with There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light. In 2022 the band returned with its ninth studio album On Capelton Hill. Although the music remained energetic, the lyrics turned inward and frequently somber, addressing mortality, impermanence, and the often harsh passage of time.