Canadian folk-rockers Half Moon Run, have officially released their third album “A Blemish In The Great Light”, an exhilarating ride filled to the brim with instrumental prowess, poignant lyricism, and raw emotion topped with unmatched vocal bravado.

“I think this album still has the sound people expect from us, balanced with more experimentation,” said drummer/multi-instrumentalist Dylan Phillips. “We’ve been diving deep into some styles that we haven’t necessarily explored before. Things get a little heavier, a little harder.”

LISTEN TO “A BLEMISH IN THE GREAT LIGHT” HERE

Half Moon Run are already reflecting on this album journey to date, “One important thing we learned this time around was to diversify our focus. Because if we get too tunnel-vision on a project it starts to get kind of strange. As an artist and musician, you need to work with other people. You need to do other things, so you can draw from different experiences that all build on each other.”

“A Blemish in the Great Light“ marks a very welcome return for the band. As a group whose art is deliberately left to do all the talking, it’s a record that takes strands from their previous work; all multi-layered instrumentation, intricate shapes and patterns, and a veritable cascading of melody, and merges it with something painted with more vivid colours, and with a rare playfulness too. The intensity and almost terse sense of atmosphere that dictates their live shows is perhaps thawed a little on these new recordings, allowing for something warmer, more embracing. Half Moon Run have noticeably matured as musicians, giving each member a fresh sense of space to complement each other’s myriad of talents and musicianship.

The release takes aim at modern ennui and responds with retrouvailles; the intrinsic happiness at rediscovering something or someone after a very long time. With this third LP, everything has changed, but also—not that much.

“(We’re) basically just re-examining everything we know about how to be a band. It’s a little bit like starting over,” says Molander. “But there’s something that’s really the same about it. It reminds me of a relationship, people really change and relationships that last are relationships that evolve. The records are like checkpoints, more than autonomous identities of their own. Whatever we’ve gained as individuals is in service of the band, and of the music.”

The band came together in 2009 in Montreal’s Mile End, when Molander and Dylan Phillips—students and recent transplants from Vancouver Island—connected with Devon Portielje, who was fresh out of Ottawa. (In mid 2012 they tapped a third Comox-born musician, Isaac Symonds, to intensify their live show.)  “If we had one real stroke of luck with this group, it was meeting each other,” says Half Moon Run’s Conner Molander. Now going on ten years together, the Montreal indie band is deep in the final push of their third album, and the temptation to look forward is as risky as the lure of looking back. 

Molander seems sanguine. He pauses, then adds, “But if you have a bit of luck it’s your responsibility to put in the work. It would be impossible to live with ourselves if we weren’t devoted to it, to working on it.”

From the outset, the group’s lingua franca was music: practising, composing, jamming. All four members are multi-instrumentalists and all four are vocalists. Whether they’re billed as dreamy alt-pop, bucolic alt-folk, or psychedelic indie rock, the word critics and fans alike come back to when describing the band’s music is “complex.” With classical training and omnivorous influences, they’ve built their name on cerebral, acrobatic arrangements and harmonies that lilt prettily till they turn feral.

The personal sacrifices they’d made for the success of the project—sacrifices that might look tiny from the distance of a bunk in a tour bus overseas—were suddenly very large and very present, back at their kitchen tables with estranged friends and mystified roommates. Home wasn’t home. Jamming wasn’t jamming. Sophomore LP Sun Leads Me On, produced by Jim Abbiss (Adele, Arctic Monkeys) dropped in late 2015. Hailed as a departure from the moody melancholia of Dark Eyes, AllMusic praised the album’s “more cosmopolitan approach,” while Mojo acknowledged that “the scenery is damned fine.” Lead single “Turn Your Love” was #1 at Triple-J in Australia.

After blowing out four back-to-back hometown shows and selling around 9,000 tickets in under 45 minutes, Half Moon Run was back to worldwide touring for another two years. They hit fourteen European festivals in fourteen weeks and sold out rooms in Canada, America, Australia, and Europe. Now, with their third LP anticipated this year, everything has changed, but also—not that much. Music continues to be the band’s first language with each other. All four members have spent the time off since Sun Leads Me On studying: that is, putting in the work that earns the luck. They’ve been practicing their instruments, reading, listening, focusing on their technical skills.

“Basically just re-examining everything we know about how to be a band. It’s a little bit like starting over,” says Molander. “Of course, jamming has changed. But there’s something that’s really the same about it. It reminds me of a relationship, people really change and relationships that last are relationships that evolve.”

An electrifying and exciting live band, Half Moon Run spent many years after their first two releases consistently touring the world, and will return to Europe this year to play their new music to sold out crowds for the first time on these shores in years, celebrating third album ‘A Blemish In The Great Light’.

“The records are like checkpoints, more than autonomous identities of their own. Whatever we’ve gained as individuals is in service of the band, and of the music,” says Molander.

Half Moon Run has also expanded their already impressive tour itinerary into 2020, adding another 20 international headline shows. The band have also partnered with PLUS1 once again, so that $1 from every ticket sold will go to Project Peanut Butter (PPB) and the treatment of severe acute malnutrition through effective, locally produced, ready-to-use therapeutic foods.

Check out the full list of tour dates at www.halfmoonrun.com, which include shows in Bristol, London, Glasgow and Manchester, with London already long since sold out.