Toronto’s madfolk are over apologizing for the stuff they grew up on. Their new single “Katherine” hit January 21st through Royal Mountain Records, and it sounds exactly like what happens when a band stops second-guessing whether Green Day and Barenaked Ladies are respectable enough influences.
“Katherine is an energetic hello to an audience that we might not have had access to before,” they say. “We wanted to put out something loud and fun to reintroduce ourselves.”
It’s the first track off a self-titled record dropping in May. Nine songs that don’t hide what they’re pulling from—shiny alt-rock and pop punk from the ’90s and 2000s, plus emo stuff like Alkaline Trio and Superdrag. The band—Finn Scott on vocals, Michael O’Meara on bass, Charlie Sills on guitar, Jackson Seaward on drums—spent years feeling weird about it.
“We used to feel self conscious about what some might perceive as child-like influences, but have decided to tap into what makes us happy and not worry about what’s cool.”
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That’s the whole thing, really. madfolk aren’t trying to reinvent anything or hide behind some carefully curated aesthetic. They write pop songs with punk energy. Strip away the noise and it’s just hooks. “We’re really focused on having pop driven hooks in our songs,” they explain.
“We like to take our favourite things about punk rock like the energy and aesthetic, but if you strip that back our music is really just pop songs.”
The four of them went to high school together, lived together in Toronto’s west end—literally a block from Royal Mountain’s office—and cut their teeth at spots like The Monarch and the now-defunct D-Beatstro, where bands like PUP and Jeff Rosenstock played. That scene is all over their sound, but so is Third Eye Blind, so is Wheatus, so is Gin Blossoms. They’re not picking sides.
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Scott wrote “Katherine” about dating apps and the mess of trying to connect with someone you’ve only seen through a screen. “I was trying to capture how it feels to judge someone solely on their profile and how easy it can be to idealize someone you’ve never met,” he says. It’s a pop-punk song about situationships and online judgment, which feels about right for a band in their early twenties navigating all that in real time.
When asked what vibe they’re going for with the full record, they don’t dress it up: “Being driven to soccer practice while Simple Plan blares from the radio of your moms 2004 Honda CRV.”
They worked on “Katherine” with engineer Dex Piecowye and producer Nick Corcoran in the same neighborhood where they live, where the label is, where they’ve been playing shows for years.
