Loversteeth’s earlier work moved like weather. Long pressure drops, layered builds, the storm finally landing somewhere around the bridge. “Closer to the Sun” doesn’t bother with any of that. It opens with a riff that goes straight for the throat, swings into a chorus with a snarl on it, and only loosens for long enough to let Erik Thorkildsen of Absorb tear through the bridge. The Hamilton and Montreal band have spent the last few years writing music that ran on tension and stark contrasts. This is the opposite.
“For our Self-Titled EP, we layered things a lot and spent more time building an atmosphere that was at times a brooding calm before a storm,” Brandon McCabe explains. “We would sometimes lose an audience to the stark contrasts, moment to moment. For this EP we wanted to dive into the roots a bit more so when it came to writing the heavier music, it absolutely came down to simplification of riffs, structures and textures. It felt more appropriate to behave like a freight train and keep things on a more focused track.”
There’s a second story under that one. “Closer to the Sun” is the first song the four of them have written collectively, music and lyrics and melodies. That hadn’t happened in the band’s history before now. Karl Lebel Viens had been pushing to take on more vocals, especially screams, and the writing process opened up around it. McCabe started demoing vocals with Karl in mind, leaving space for him to scream parts while Brandon sang underneath, or vice versa. Karl in turn would flag guitar parts he could carry vocally in a live setting. “It all came from a place of open-mindedness and a willingness to participate,” McCabe says.
The song lands with teeth showing. The chorus crawls and bites at the same time. “I don’t wanna hurt anymore / But I’ll fuckin do it.” The bridge buckles into Thorkildsen’s vocal, and then the band shoves the whole thing toward the end on a single repeating idea: “See you in the next life, keep your crown.”
That last line is the song’s centre of gravity, and Loversteeth have been direct about what it’s aimed at. “This song is about the hypocrisy of religious zealots and the negative effects that their institutionalized religions have upon outsiders,” they offer. “Preaching love while oppressing same sex love is as harmful as the legislation that mandates the choices a person has over their body.” McCabe puts it more plainly: “Religion has historically been a tool of manipulation for Religious Institutions, and that the core values and teachings are often lost, or bent to fit the agenda of the loudest of the ignorant, or the most malicious of the powerful. Spirituality, love, and consciousness are all independent personal journeys. They ought to be treated with care.”
The title nods to Icarus while the verses sit thick with crucifixion imagery: “vilify, crucify me / 3 days slithering into my own skin / with no resurrection.” Two myths of punishment for flying too close to something, stitched onto a song about people getting punished for who they love.
The defiant read of “keep your crown” is the obvious one. The less obvious one is that the song is also about care. McCabe doesn’t see a contradiction. “Having compassion for somebody you don’t agree with is a pillar upon which the means to understand one another is planted,” he says. “Having the fortitude to draw a line in the sand and refuse to have your personal, physical, emotional or spiritual boundaries encroached upon is a show of that same compassion for yourself.” Or, in the band’s collective phrasing: “In the end, we’re all food for the worms, so we intend to extend care or compassion to ourselves and others. It helps us understand one another. That understanding is to heal. Anyone with their nose in the air at that, or concerned with who somebody shares their bed with, isn’t invited to our party. If resurrection is a reality, we’ll see you in the next life, but in the meantime, you can keep your crown.”
The video lands the same point with a visual: real worms in real mouths. Karl had been pushing the idea since the earliest demos of the song. Zach Fratoni shot and edited the whole thing in the band’s jam space, no outside crew, no rented location.
“In regard to the video, or most things as they relate to the band, we feel like nobody will care as much as we do,” McCabe says. “We’ve worked with people in the past with whom we have made great art and had a blast doing so.
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For this video, we wanted to take more time and ownership over everything and figure it out ourselves. We wanted to prove to ourselves that we can problem-solve and do things DIY from top to bottom.”
The worms, he’s careful to point out, were treated alright. “The worms themselves were harmless little critters. We probably bummed them out way harder than they did us.” The song never mentions worms or death or dirt. The video carries that subtext for it. As McCabe explains, “Being that death is a final destination for all of us, the song speaks to the fact that nobody should be lobbying to make life more difficult for anyone else during our stay here.”
The band have been at this since 2022, and they’ve moved a lot of ground in those years. They’ve played across Canada and the United States supporting Vended, Celeste, Whores and Silverstein, played NXNE, Hamilton’s Supercrawl, and most recently Juno Fest 2026, and built out coverage in Exclaim!, No Echo, Toxic Metal Zine, Up The Volume and Chasing Destino.
Outside the touring side, they’ve made a habit of supporting Hamilton-area causes: Helping Hamilton Homeless, Neighbour to Neighbour Centre, and Scott’s Encore through the Hamilton Health Sciences Foundation. The community work isn’t decorative. It sits on the same axis as the lyrics on “Closer to the Sun.”
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Geography shapes the rest of their working life. Loversteeth are split between Hamilton and Montreal, all four of them in their 30s with day jobs, partners, and bills. The writing happens on planned weekends, calendars locked in advance, with stretches of demo time sitting between sessions so everyone can chew on the ideas before committing.
“Karl is a proud French-Canadian with family roots in Quebec, and a desire to be close to them and a culture that is a big part of who he is,” McCabe explains. “He’s also an active member of the music community in Montreal, making connections there has allowed us to treat Montreal like a second hometown and collectively it’s one of our favourite places to be, for music, friends or the mayhem of it all.”
The credits read like a map of that scattered process. Drums tracked by Chris Snow at Catherine North Studio. Vocals tracked by Chris Snow at Crows Nest Studio. Guitars and bass tracked by Andy Dmytryshyn at School House Studio in Dundas, Ontario. Mixed and mastered by Mike Watts at Vudu Studios. Album artwork by Charles Capretta. Album photo by Sarah Lebel Viens. Erik Thorkildsen of Absorb on the bridge of this one. Every piece handled by someone close enough to the band to care.
The Andy Dmytryshyn and Erik Thorkildsen choices both had history behind them. McCabe has known Dmytryshyn since the start of his playing life.
“Andy D is somebody I’ve known from the very beginning of my almost 20 years of playing music. Growing up playing shows together, Andy was one of the first peers that helped open my ears to tone, and production. Over the years seeing first hand his proficiency as a guitar and bass player, Andy has always been a sounding board for me to ask questions about tone or approach. In more recent years Andy had become a key member of School House studio, having turned out close to 50-60 records. He’s a natural, and was an obvious choice for string tracking.”
Thorkildsen, McCabe notes, fronts what might be the heaviest band Hamilton has produced. “Erik Thorkildsen fronts a band called Absorb, and they’re possibly the heaviest band ever birthed from Hamilton. From sharing the stage with those guys, knowing not only what he’s capable of, but that he’s one of the best dudes on planet earth, he made his way to the top of a short list of artists we would want to collaborate with. He’s just a good time. It’s hard to tell what came first, the music or desire to bring him in. However I can say for certain we’re all happy he was into it.”
“Closer to the Sun” lands inside an EP called “Floral Violence,” out June 24, and McCabe describes the record’s arc as a linear one. “It would start with the wake-up call that things aren’t right. It would examine the political and religious systems that govern our world and shape people’s minds. It would reject harmful iterations of those ideas in favour of the fortitude to forge its own path. It acknowledges that some people don’t want to wake up, either because of the shackles of generational teachings or because they realize we’re marching off a cliff, too much to deal with. It comes to terms with the finality of it all and begs to shed its baggage in favour of a more holistic and peaceful existence. Before finally accepting that all we have is our time, our love, and the people we share it with.”
“Closer to the Sun” sits closer to the rejection part of that arc than the acceptance one. The acceptance comes later. The worms in the video are a hint at where it’s heading. “And not only are we tighter than you’ve ever heard us,” the band offer, “but we’re also pissed and have something to say.”
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