Yukon Blonde gets ready to give fans the weirdness they want at Khatsahlano Street Party main stage
In anticipation of its sixth album Shuggie, Vancouver band rolls out songs that beeline for the listener’s pleasure centres
A risky career path has won the Vancouver-based outfit more fans than it’s lost.
Yukon Blonde is at the Khatsahlano Street Party July 8
YUKON BLONDE mounts the main stage on West 4th Avenue this Saturday for its second-ever headlining spot at the Khatsalano Street Party, beating the odds on a risky career path that has won the Vancouver-based outfit more fans than it’s lost.
“I sure hope so,” says Brandon Scott with a chuckle, and maybe a small hint of anxiety. “I hope we haven’t blown them all away with weird music.” Significantly, on the very same morning that Stir reaches the guitarist at home, a bright and chipper new single has magically appeared on Spotify. “Every Single Time You Fall in Love” isn’t weird, as such, but it is classic Yukon Blonde, pitting an irresistible hook and shimmering harmonies against singer Jeff Innes’s observation that “every time you fall in love, your brain releases poison.”
Equally fetching is a track released earlier this spring, “Up 2 U”, where the band’s jones for dancefloor-ready ’80s synth pop brings a light touch to some otherwise tart subject matter. Either track makes a beeline for the listener’s pleasure centres, boding well for Yukon Blonde’s sixth album Shuggie when it arrives sometime in the autumn. Currently a four-piece including bassist James Younger and drummer Graham Jones, the band spent last year crafting Shuggie in Innis’s basement studio, located in the placid suburban paradise of Coquitlam.
“It’s very cushy,” laughs Scott. “It’s got a nice little backyard. We felt like business commuters every morning. We'd meet at 9 o’clock at Bosa foods, get our burritos, hop in the van and go out to Coquitlam with all these commuters going to work who look absolutely miserable. But we’d do 9 to 5, clock in, clock out. And it was great! I’d come home for dinner with my partner. It felt like a good day’s work.” Button-down work ethic aside, the guitarist points to MGMT as spiritual kin in terms of their creative ambitions. “They’re weird freaks who just wanna do weird shit,” as the guitarist puts it. "And I think that spoke to us a lot.”
Of course, MGMT might say the same of the eternally restless Yukon Blonde. The galaxy-brained synth-pop of 2020’s magnificent Vindicator is a long, long way from the indie guitar rock we heard on Yukon Blonde’s self-titled debut 10 years earlier. In between was 2015’s On Blonde and 2018’s Critical Hit, both of which established Yukon Blonde as unusually genre-curious. Few bands demonstrate such loyalty to the muse or the courage to challenge their listeners, and Vindicator arrived like a sonic exclamation point at the end of a daring career arc.
It was also the record that opened the door on collaboration, relieving Innes of sole songwriting duties. “We kinda made it a pact between all of us that the best song wins, and I think that really opened us as a band,” says Scott. The same strategy was brought to Shuggie, and while the guitarist concedes that some people are “hoping for the next ‘Saturday Night’ or ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’”, it appears, in reality—and certainly based on Yukon Blonde’s undiminished popularity—that most actually aren’t. In other words, expectations are high for Saturday’s show and maybe even higher for Shuggie. Speaking of: what’s with that name? Scott laughs. “It’s one of my favourite songs but I don’t know what it’s about to be honest. It’s a Jeff-ism. It was like, ‘Shuggie!’ It’s a great name! It’s light, and fun, and good!” Not to mention weird.
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