BACK IN THE SADDLE
Mares of Thrace Ride Again with The Exile
YOU COULD BE FORGIVEN FOR THINKING the title of Mares of Thrace’s new album, The Exile, was about the band itself. It’s been almost a decade since the doom metal duo put out an album. Demo “Dead French Mathematicians” materialized in 2014, but that was the only release between 2012’s Polaris Music Prize long-listed The Pilgrimage and now.
The reason is simple enough: vocalist-guitarist Thérèse Lanz and longtime drummer Stef MacKichan had to pay the bills. They both went back to school: MacKichan is now a registered nurse, while Lanz is a video game concept artist. The band weren’t finished, though the distance was proving difficult for the duo to make music.
“For both of us, a lot of the joy is just being loud in a room with your friends,” Lanz says. “Trading .wav files across the internet wasn’t the same.” Lanz and MacKichan planned to meet in the same city and record in 2017, but the trip was derailed by a family medical emergency, and finding time to record felt impossible.
Lanz was ready to give up when Casey Rogers, an old friend and former bandmate, said what she calls the magic words: “‘I’ll fill on drums if I have to, and you should still put it out because it would be a shame to waste good riffs.’” With MacKichan’s support for the band to push ahead, The Exile features Rogers on drums, and no good riff is wasted — guitars tear through the mix like valkyries in battle, bestriding Rogers’s pummelling rhythms and Lanz’s commanding growl.
Lyrically, The Exile explores the seemingly endless wander Lanz has found herself on over the past few years. She explains, “I’m somewhat leery of using lofty terms like ‘concept album,’ but the album is about having to leave home and not ever being able to go back. That was weighing on my mind pretty heavily as I shamelessly moved from city to city.”
The future of Mares isn’t totally clear — Lanz is moving back to Calgary, and hopes to tour when COVID-19 seems less of a risk. Still, the positive response to a new Mares record has surprised her, and the time between albums has only deepened her love of making metal.
“I was lucky enough to find a means of supporting myself doing something artistic,” she says. “But there’s always been a hole in my heart that can only be filled by riffs.”