Separation Anxiety: Preoccupations on their rebirth

Early last year, Preoccupations released their debut LP. Since forming in Calgary, Alberta in 2012, they’d worked their way up to this point gradually, in tried and true fashion; a self-released EP cassette, an appearance at SxSW that set tongues wagging, a deal with a local label, the re-release of that EP – simply titled Cassette – to a wider audience, and then another deal with a big indie player – in this case, Jagjaguwar.

The eventual full-length record met with rave reviews, nabbed the coveted Best New Music mantle on Pitchfork, wound up near the top of a slew of end-of-year rundowns, and secured a nomination for the Polaris Music Prize in their native Canada. They spent practically all of the last calendar year on the road, selling shows out on both sides of the Atlantic.

There is, of course, a caveat here. They weren’t called Preoccupations in 2015. In one of the more memorable recent incidents of indie rock foot-shooting, they went by Viet Cong, a gross cultural insensitivity that was naïve at best. That it took them so long to back down and change it suggested boorish ignorance in the face of both a slew of internet thinkpieces and protests outside shows.

They weren’t the only band to ruffle feathers with their moniker at the time, with Slaves and Girl Band coming under fire also; Viet Cong themselves were born out of the ashes of Women, another group that could potentially stand accused of titular clumsiness. Unlike those outfits, though, they bowed to the pressure last autumn, acknowledging the upset caused and promising to rebrand themselves.

“It was something that definitely got stressful a few times," says guitarist Scott 'Monty' Munro over a transatlantic phone line. "There were a few shows in the States, and a few in Toronto, that were heavily protested – there were maybe more than a hundred people showing up to some of them." It was, he explains, those interactions that ultimately led the band to realise the gravity of their faux pas, and seek to make amends. “It wasn't like they were hipster kids, or YouTube trolls, or anything like that. It was actually elderly Vietnamese people who had fled the war there, so having conversations with them and their children was eye-opening. I think, because of that, it ended up being a positive thing."

New name, new album

By September, they announced their intention to ditch the Viet Cong banner, a move they’d apparently decided upon months earlier. They didn’t rush it, though... in fact they were so relaxed that by the following March, Canadian music mag Exclaim! reported that they were continuing to book shows as Viet Cong, starting up a counter online – ‘days since Viet Cong promised to change their name.'

The band took time to ruminate on the subject, with each member drawing up a list of potential options and asking their friend and labelmate Chad VanGaalen to do likewise. “We spent a while weeding through all these lists we’d put together,” explains Munro, “and then finally ended up with a final five that we all liked. Preoccupations basically won out by default, because it was the only one that wasn’t already a band.”

The four-piece went public with their new identity back in April, announcing another self-titled album in the process. With personnel on the record remaining the same as on Viet Cong, right down to Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh once again manning the boards in a production capacity, this is ostensibly the follow-up that the band would have made either way, although this certainly isn't to say they haven't made clear developments. Viet Cong was an invariably tense affair, thick with doomy atmosphere; Preoccupations has the band playing around with electronics in a way that brings a degree of lightness to their sound.

“There’s some major key stuff on there which just didn’t exist on the last record,” Munro elaborates. “There was a lot of dissonance on Viet Cong, and it felt like everything was coming over in a minor key. We had a couple of riffs for the last album that we just kind of knew we couldn’t use, because they wouldn’t fit or feel right. This time, they made it onto the album, and they were some of the first things that we gravitated towards. We were ready to go in that direction. Something like the end of Memory, for example – that feels a long way from the last album.”

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Memory is the one track on Preoccupations that is bound to draw comparisons with Death from its predecessor. Both tracks sprawl beyond 11 minutes in length and veer into drone territory, but where the latter flitted between melodic guitar lines and harsh, clanging riffs, Memory gradually drifts towards a shimmering wall of reverb that fades into ambience, like Explosions in the Sky channeling Eno's Music for Airports.

“It feels like there’s less urgency, like it’s more measured, it’s a result of the way we worked on this record,” says Munro. “It was more like how we worked on our first EP. The last album, we took those songs out on the road for a long time, and then re-recorded the demos in about five days total. We had a lot longer this time.

“We just took it pretty easy, going back to Graham’s studio in rural Ontario. There’s a loft you can live in there, and it made sense to just book a couple of weeks every time we had a break from the road, because it wasn’t like we had anywhere to go back to anyway; we put all of our things into storage and just lived this transient life, so we had no houses to go back to or anything. We’d get up late, make breakfast, and then work late into the night, just sort of chipping away at the songs, which were much more like construction projects than last time.”

That state of rootlessness, of a lack of a sense of a settled base, has helped to inform the mood and themes of Preoccupations; even a cursory glance over the tracklisting suggests that this is very much a record concerned with the politics of the self – Anxiety, Degraded, Monotony, Stimulation and Fever are amongst the one-word titles distilling the feel of the songs themselves. As Munro puts it, “We definitely made a conscious choice to try to encapsulate what was going on in the track in one word, and those ideas are definitely reflective of things that have been going on in our lives since the last record.”

Personal upheaval is a clear thematic throughline, more so than on Viet Cong. “I feel like the lyrics are even darker in places,” says Munro. “Matt and I both had long-term relationships break down over the course of the last year, and that definitely played into the record. It’s definitely been a transitional period of my life, and I’m sure that’s affected the music. Like I said, we didn’t really live anywhere last year, and it forced us to throw everything we had into becoming a full-time band. That’s daunting, but it also made me realise that I’m probably happier when I’m not tied to too many things.”

"Anything that divides people is bad" – politics and Brexit

As much as personal politics provide the emotional bedrock on Preoccupations, it doesn’t seem as if the band are likely to turn their gaze outwards at the state of the world around them any time soon – even if they did break character to urge UK-based followers on social media to vote remain last month.

“We were in London playing a couple of small shows and doing press while that was happening, and it just felt like the right thing to do to put that out there. Anything that divides people is bad – we’re not pro anything like that, ever. There was no deep meaning behind it – it was more just a case of 'go vote, it’ll make a difference.' But obviously it didn’t, which is super unfortunate. It seems like the only outcome is going to be that the UK loses its seat at the table and its voice in making the rules. It looks like, ultimately, it just came down to xenophobia."

Munro has been casting a concerned eye over his North American neighbours south of the Canadian border, too. “I think, in the context of the U.S. election, it feels like it’s a lot easier to vote for an idea, rather than a person. If the leave and remain campaigns had been down to actually voting for two different people, there might have been a different outcome.

“Like, if Americans were put to a referendum about leaving the North American Free Trade Agreement, I feel like a lot of people would vote to leave it, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the same people who’d vote for Trump. We’re going to be on tour in America in the lead-up to the election, so that should be super interesting. I still have hope.”

What is clear is that Preoccupations have put themselves in a position to be considerably more optimistic about the future, the weight of that self-inflicted wound now lifted. “Honestly, it does feel like a clean break,” admits Munro. “We knew from the very first session that this record was coming out under a different name, and that gave us a clean slate, so we knew we didn’t need to worry about keeping anything the same if we didn’t want to. We talked about maybe breaking the band up, and reforming with an extra member so that it felt like a new band. I sort of feel like we did do that – just with the same four guys!”