HYPE FOR MOTHER MOTHER
Album follows TikTok explosion
Mother Mother releases Inside on June 25. It's the eighth album from the Vancouver quintet and its first to come out on Warner Records.
It's also the group's first album to arrive since a trio of tunes from its 2007 album O My Heart — Hayloft, Arms Tonite and Wrecking Ball — went viral online on TikTok.
In a story that's playing out repeatedly across the music industry, fans incorporated the band's music in TikTok posts that exploded across the video-sharing platform. This led to a massive surge to 25.8 million likes at the mothermothermusic TikTok page, and a subsequent explosion of views across all social media platforms. It has catapulted the band into entirely new career heights.
The first single from Inside, titled I Got Love, hit No. 1 on Canadian radio.
To show their appreciation, the video for the tune was created by splicing more than 4,000 of those fan videos from around the world together for a moving musical clip with a positive message about caring for others that is perfect for COVID-19 isolation.
Lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Ryan Guldemond says it feels like a new beginning for the well-established band, which is now turning up on Billboard's Emerging Artist Chart.
“Fifteen years deep, looking back and, perhaps, perceiving the apex having been and gone, to realize that we are only getting started really took us all by surprise,” he said. “After seven or eight records, there is a healthy realism that casts that kind of judgment on a career to keep you grounded and stable and moving forward. But there is also a dreamer that keeps fed and nourished by letting go and surrendering to the great unknown and making the best music possible. Over time, you strike a balance, but this is something new.”
The “something new” hasn't gone unnoticed by the new label.
Inside is the first album to receive spontaneous release across several markets including the U.S., U.K. and Germany, among others. Guldemond notes that this is a really big deal.
“You want `the great unveil' to be equal across one territory to the next, as that means it's much more energetic and excited,” he said. “It's a really new and delightful way of doing things that we never really knew we were going to get to. Like the humble bow to the universe and the forces that be with fans on TikTok, it's not something that we take for granted.”
The 14 songs on Inside weren't taken for granted either. As a product of the pandemic, the tunes reflect a range of emotions from the positive reinforcement of I Got Love to the long closing meditation on wanting human contact in Inside, and the writing is some of the singer's most introspective.
“Honestly, I tried to just respond to the pandemic moment and this ominous feeling of Armageddon,” he said. “To do so, the production straddles folk and industrial while all the while trying to tap into hope and love without dismissing the dark side, which is often the thing that brings those qualities to light. That was my angle, a response to the energy of the world at the time of writing and my own solitude.”
That sense of solitude is ever-present in songs such as Two. With its spoken-word sample repeating “why should we become frightened?” and the narrator describing having a cage around their heart, a claustrophobic atmosphere is built. This mood is then torn down by the soaring harmony vocals of keyboardist/singers Molly Guldemond and Jasmin Parkin.
“That sample felt right to use as almost an encapsulating mantra for people, not just caught up in navigating the depths of a pandemic, but caught up in the depths of themselves,” he said. “The album is about getting unstuck from the kind of quagmire that something like a pandemic brings, and then going on the journey within to slay the dragons and come out on the other side a little more healed.”
It's a message that the group will be delivering across the planet on the recently announced 2022 world tour.
Already extended since it was announced in early June, the tour includes a sold-out show at Heaven in London, England, and an added date in the O2 Forum there as well. There are also four dates in a row at the Commodore Ballroom from Dec. 2-4, a booking that puts the band in a select group of hometown artists such as 5440 and Colin James who can play back-to-back gigs at the venerable venue. The members are taking it in stride, although they're “wondering if they have the right band.”