Building oddball pop from the ground up
Montreal’s She-Devils emerge with one of the year’s most critically lauded indie debuts
Montreal’s She-Devils have had an exceedingly busy and “buzzy” 2017, but the cost of suddenly being confronted with a paying audience for their recordings — or at least the potential for one — was having to rethink how Audrey Ann and Kyle Jukka made those recordings.
The myriad of vintage samples upon which their whimsical oddball pop tunes had typically been constructed instantly threatened to impose a monetary cost upon their art when She-Devils stopped giving their music away for free online and signed deals with Arbutus Records in Canada and Secretly Canadian in the States to release their self-titled debut album earlier this year.
Rather than face a crippling onslaught of clearance fees and/or cease-and-desist letters from the many artists whose dusty old LPs they’d pillaged for raw materials, the pair opted instead to start building their tracks from the ground up.
“It used to be really simple,” says Jukka, an Uxbridge expat who handles the production side of the She-Devils repertoire.
“I would literally just, like, sample a two-second loop from a song that I felt in repetition sounded good as a loop. I would make tons of these things and pass them off to Audrey and she would sing on them, and there was very little else that I would do. I would kind of fill out the sound a bit.
“But at this point the process, for me, is getting even more detailed where I’m kind of, I guess, doing more ‘constructions.’ If it’s a beat, it’s usually a mixture of a couple of things — maybe a sample, but then also just sort of texture that’s from my own world and my own experiments. For something to be a beat, it needs maybe two or three elements to kind of come together.”
Fortunately, Jukka and Ann ( née Boucher) turned what might have been a grave logistical disadvantage to their advantage on She-Devils, emerging with one of the year’s most beguilingly offbeat and critically lauded indie debuts.
A lo-fi mishmash of B-movie-soundtrack camp, primitivist sci-fi atmospherics and the sort of winsome, transatlantic girly-pop sounds propagated by the likes of Nancy Sinatra, Peggy Lee and yé-yé poster child Françoise Hardy during the 1960s, the new album retains the same staticky, deep-from-the-stacks audio consistency as the duo’s earliest releases despite the fact that its foundational building blocks are no longer pulled deep from staticky stacks: a feat that consistently makes the music on She-Devils feel much warmer and more “organic” than its electronic assembly might imply.
Which is sort of the aim. The phrase “retro-futurism” is frequently evoked in reference to She-Devils, more often than not by She-Devils themselves.
Jukka holds up The Jetsons and The Flintstones as nonmusical influences particularly indicative of the desired feel he and Ann are going for. In the past, they also posited the films of Gregg Araki, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, as well as such animated TV series as The Simpsons and The Powerpuff Girls, as influences upon their oeuvre as important as any of the old records they might have exhumed to create it.
In faithful service of that vision, She-Devils also control the multimedia duties that go along with being in a band; Ann is responsible for the garish doodles that adorn their records and merchandise, while she and Jukka co-direct all their videos.
It might seem that She-Devils have reached a global platform rather quickly for a band formed just three years ago after a number of false starts by Ann and Jukka — who met as roommates sharing an artsy jam space in Mile End — and featuring a singer who’d never sung a note before, at that. But the pair found themselves blessed with an instant, supportive audience in Montreal
“We had some friends who were really, really encouraging . . . so that really gave us the sense that there was something kind of magical about (our music).” KYLE JUKKA
and, slowly but surely, other ports of call they visited before they’d uploaded even a single MP3 to the internet.
Rather quickly, they realized their private exercise in weirdness threatened to turn into something bigger than they could have anticipated.
“It was pretty much almost just as soon as we started playing,” recalls Jukka. “We had some friends who were really, really encouraging. It was like they were almost profoundly impacted by what we were doing, so that really gave us the sense that there was something kind of magical about it, even though maybe not everyone understood it — which just made it even more cool because it’s art, it’s subjective and I feel like sometimes if people connect with it it’s pretty intuitive and if they don’t connect with it, it’s just maybe that they’re just not susceptible to its specific form of hypnosis.”
She-Devils play the Camp Wavelength festival on Sunday as part of the “Day Camp in the City” event at Sherbourne Common park hastily convened earlier this summer when it became clear the fest’s traditional home on the west end of Toronto Islands would be too waterlogged to host a weekend-long indie-rock camp-out.
After that, there are more touring obligations to be honoured at least through September and then it’s back to the studio for Ann and Jukka to complete the work that has already begun on the next She-Devils LP.
“We have kind of a whole new landscape of music coming together so I think we’re just kind of starting to scheme and think about how we want to record the music, and just get going on that,” says Jukka.
“The music could potentially be surprising to some.”