Montreal has a pretty great habit of throwing hardcore, shoegaze, punk and all sorts of noisy guitar bands onto the same bill. Fever Visions know that world well. The three guys play restless, guitar-driven post-punk with a fair bit of old-school punk in their system, plus some frenetic post-punk, shoegaze and goth creeping in, and their debut LP, “This Place Is Full of Noises“, has a lot to do with the people, gigs and different corners of the underground they’ve been part of over the years.
There’s also a good chunk of local history attached to the record. They recorded it at Hotel2Tango with Howard Bilerman, bringing along six songs they’d already released in 2024 and another six newer ones. And for a band that’s only been around since early 2023, they’ve got quite a few stories to tell.
Take their album release gig on 3 July. At La Sotterenea, Fever Visions shared the stage with Boar God, who play moody shoegaze, Technicolor Blood’s heavy psych and space rock, and the noisy sludge of Slouche. That’s a pretty mixed-up adn eclectic bill, and apparently a normal night out for these guys.
Earlier in January, they’d played a benefit at Foufounes Électriques with street punk bands Ballistix, The Defamed and Unwanted Noise, plus the now-defunct feminist rock/post-punk band Chârogne. A couple of weeks before that, they were at Turbo Haüs with Toronto punks Zero Bars and Montreal hardcore crew Trauma Bond.
Fever Visions sit quite comfortably among all of them. Guitarist and vocalist Jon Astras, drummer and vocalist Alex M, and bassist and vocalist Adam Schipper have spent years getting involved in their respective punk scenes, seeing local bands, buying their merch, playing gigs and generally being around the music.
For Jon and Alex, that history is largely in Montreal. Adam’s route started a fair way west, in Brandon, Manitoba, where he picked up bass at fourteen so he could play punk with his mates.
He went through a string of short-lived bands, playing basements, community centres, people’s living rooms and, at one point, the hallways of his high school. Recording meant using what he remembers as the world’s worst laptop and the world’s worst microphones. The bands came and went, but the experience was great fun. Adam still jokingly considers those days his musical gold standard, with Hotel2Tango getting the one exception.
Jon’s own punk adventures stretch back to around 2004, when he started playing shows with Glamourous Maggots. They lasted until roughly 2008 and stuck to the local Montreal circuit, although they managed to get onto two international underground punk compilations, “Lambination 2” and “Lambination 3”, released by Ireland’s Deadlamb Records.
Their contribution to “Lambination 2” was recorded on a four-track cassette machine at the bassist’s place. Proper DIY stuff, and pretty much what you’d expect from a small punk band trying to get their songs out there in the mid-2000s.
After Glamourous Maggots broke up, Jon moved on to garage-punk band Orange Pulp, kept playing around Montreal and got involved with other musicians over the following years.
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In 2011, he met Alex, who was playing keyboards and organ at the time. They started making music together and began dating shortly afterwards. They’re still together today, and when Fever Visions came together in 2023, Alex took up the drums and vocals alongside Jon and Adam.
Their long friendship and shared history come in handy when they’re working on songs. Jon writes the basic stuff, bringing in riffs and song structures, but the finished arrangements are a group effort. Everybody comes up with their own parts, throws ideas around and decides what works. Sometimes they’ll cut something, add another section or change a bridge completely.
Jon is pretty firm about how much the others bring to the songs. As the band put it, “This is where the song becomes a Fever Visions song”, and “for him, song writing is overrated; the magic happens in the arrangements.”
With Alex being his partner and Adam one of his closest friends, there’s plenty of trust between them. Each person can do their own thing and have a proper say in how the song develops.
The guys are also keen on making sure they don’t end up recording twelve variations of the same tune. They grew up around punk and DIY music, and those early experiences still shape the way they work. They want the songs to have their own character, even when they’re coming from different musical directions.
“It’s really important to us that not all our songs sound the same or just seem like different versions of the same song,” they told us, adding that they’ve worked hard to find a recognisable style without tying themselves too closely to one particular genre or band.
You can hear where they’re coming from in the music’s punk connections. In his October review for Maximum Rocknroll, Seth McBurney picked up on the sharp, early-’80s Southern California punk feel of the guitar riffs, with Jon’s vocals occasionally reminding him of Jello Biafra. He also heard bits of Minutemen, Embrace, Refused, later post-hardcore and even the Coltranes.
The quick rhythmic changes are a big part of that description. These songs can settle into a particular rhythm and then take a sharp turn, with the guitar, bass and drums finding another way through the section. There’s plenty going on within the band’s post-punk base, and their shoegaze and goth interests add other possibilities to the mix.
Before the LP, Fever Visions had already put out two three-song sessions in 2024. “Rise” arrived in February, followed by “Omissions” in October. Local sound technician and engineer Mike Poisson recorded both.
When they decided to make the album, all six songs were still in good shape. The band didn’t have any particular urge to tear them apart and write them again. They liked the compositions and wanted to give them a consistent recording alongside six newer tracks.
“We definitely wanted the same pulse on all 12 songs,” they said.
There had been some differences in the production between the two sessions with Mike, so they headed into Hotel2Tango in early 2026 to record the whole lot again with Howard Bilerman.
For anyone who’s followed Montreal’s independent music for a while, Hotel2Tango is a pretty familiar name. The Mile End studio has been around in various forms since the 1990s. Before it became a dedicated recording studio, the original space was also used for gigs and rehearsals. It developed close ties to the city’s experimental and indie scenes, especially the musicians around Constellation Records, and moved into its current premises in 2007.
The place has hosted an enormous range of artists over the years. Godspeed You! Black Emperor and A Silver Mt. Zion are probably among the first names many people will associate with it, alongside Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade and The Dears. Then you’ve got Coeur de Pirate, Suuns, We Are Wolves, AIDS Wolf and King Khan & BBQ, all part of that recording history too.
It’s run by four musicians and engineers with plenty of their own history in Montreal: Efrim Menuck, Thierry Amar, Radwan Moumneh and Howard Bilerman.
So yeah, for Jon, Alex and Adam, getting to make their first full-length there meant something. They’d been following and taking part in Montreal music for years, and now they were recording in a place they’d long associated with that history.
“We definitely feel closer to the Montreal scene just by recording there.”
They chose Bilerman mainly because of his experience, and he had quite a bit of input during the sessions. Guitar tones, drum sounds, possible overdubs and the general way the band was coming across on tape all got attention.
The goal was to keep enough of what makes Fever Visions work onstage while giving the recordings their own sound. Jon uses a vocal processor pedalboard at gigs, for instance, and they had to work out how those effects should come through on the album.
They quickly learned that something which sounds great through a live PA might need a different approach in the studio. Bilerman helped them sort through those decisions while recording and mixing the LP, with Shae Brossard assisting.
The band had already gone in thinking the live and recorded versions should offer slightly different experiences, and they were happy to experiment to get there. Jon also recommended giving the finished record a spin on headphones to catch more of Bilerman’s stereo panning.
Harris Newman handled mastering at Grey Market Mastering, while Unexpected Specter created the cover art.
And then there’s the album title, which takes us into a slightly different part of the guys’ interests.
Jon and Adam are both into literature and philosophy. Adam recently completed his PhD in philosophy and teaches literature and philosophy at university, so the two of them were keen to bring a literary reference into the record somewhere.
They eventually landed on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, specifically a speech by Caliban in Act III, Scene II, beginning with the words, “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises.”
In the play, Caliban talks about the strange sounds and voices that fill the island, sometimes comforting him, sometimes disturbing him. He’s surrounded by spirits, sorcerers and other strange beings, moving between dreams and waking life, and repeatedly wishing he could go back to the dreams he’s been pulled out of.
The Montreal connection wasn’t lost on the band. Their city is an island too, and they liked the idea of a place full of different noises, voices and experiences.
They settled on “This Place Is Full of Noises“, dropping the opening reassurance and changing the wording enough to make it their own. They also wanted the title to work for the places people find themselves in mentally.
As they explained, it could be anywhere you physically happen to be, or the sort of place you’re talking about when you tell somebody, “I’m in a weird place now.”
The songs deal with what they call “a sort of cynical optimism or hopeful nihilism, fear, and longing”.
The track order follows that thinking fairly loosely, although they gave the opening and closing songs a little more attention.
“Where We Separate” starts the album with physical and ideological distance between people. Its lyrics keep returning to disappearing, being apart and finding yourself somewhere that exists partly in your own head.
The band also connected the song to Tiohtià, the Kanien’kéha name associated with Montreal. They’d come across an interpretation relating to groups separating, which interested them because of the city’s long-running French and English language politics and its location on Indigenous land. The name has several proposed origins, and research commissioned for the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà cautions against treating any single translation as definitive. For Fever Visions, it was a loose connection that worked with the song’s ideas about people being divided in different ways.
Elsewhere on the album, “Omissions” gets pretty confrontational about manipulation, selective truths and people using words to exert control. “Deny” goes after belief and the words people repeat until they lose their meaning, while “The Sun Is Not Your God” has some pointed questions for people claiming special spiritual knowledge.
“Gods for Mayhem” pushes into violence, destruction and religious authority, including the rather unpleasant idea of gods who can’t be bothered to answer anybody’s prayers. “They’re Watching You” has a repeated warning about being watched, exposed and afraid to move, while “The Not-So-Subtle Art of Swallowing a Soul Whole” works through images of dehumanisation and somebody else controlling the steps of a dance.
There’s plenty of repetition throughout the lyrics. “Rise” keeps returning to the image of somebody rising and falling, “Wide Eyed” moves through childhood questions, promises and fear, and “Dim Lights” takes fading light into questions about whether somebody is really present or simply overwhelmed by everyday life.
“Forbidden Lovers“, meanwhile, is full of things people struggle to say to each other, with the repeated idea that they could still be lovers if they found a way to speak openly.
Then “Hunger People” brings the whole record to a close.
That final song is particularly close to Jon. It’s about finding something that gives life meaning, and for him that includes making music with Fever Visions and meeting Alex. The repeated line “I found a reason, that reason is you” says quite a lot in very few words.
The album starts with people drifting apart and finishes with somebody finding a reason to stay connected. That’s a reading the band themselves had in mind when they put the songs in order.
Back around Montreal, they’ve continued taking gigs wherever their music seems to fit. One show they pointed out, even though they weren’t on the bill themselves, happened at Foufounes Électriques on 5 November 2025. It brought together oi band Béton Armé, the dance-friendly hardcore punk of Faze, Toronto electro-punks Slash Need and hardcore band Chain Block.
That’s another pretty good example of the kind of nights they enjoy. You might show up for one band and end up checking out three others that aren’t quite your usual thing.
Montreal has plenty of events doing their own versions of this. POP Montreal has spent around twenty-five years putting together a huge variety of local and international artists, from folk and singer-songwriters to punk and much else. Taverne Tour, running since 2016, gets garage, rock, punk and occasional hip-hop and rap acts involved.
Then you’ve got festivals with a tighter punk focus, including A Varning from Montreal Festival, which brings together local and international DIY punk bands, and Pouzza Fest, which concentrates on punk rock.
Fever Visions have been able to jump between quite a few of those different crowds, and they’ve also started doing more gigs outside their hometown. Ottawa, Toronto and northern Quebec have all been on their recent itinerary. They’re keen to get further around Canada, head down to the US when things become a little more sensible, and hopefully make it over to Europe eventually.
In the meantime, there’s a full-length to get into. Fever Visions released “This Place Is Full of Noises” independently on 3 July 2026. It’s available digitally through Bandcamp, with a transparent pink vinyl edition, black inner sleeve and two-sided lyric insert also up for sale. The album has started appearing on other streaming services, including Amazon Music.
Twelve songs, a few years of making music together, and a whole lot of earlier punk history behind the three people playing them. Give the record a proper spin, and keep an eye out for the next gig.
