SEUM came together in a Montreal parking lot. June 2019, three French immigrants approaching 40 met for the first time outside the now-defunct Katakombes, waiting for Dopethrone to start a set at the nearby Club Soda. Gaspard had been in Lord Humungus, Piotr in Mlah!, Fred in Uluun โ each of them had played metal for years in Europe before moving to Canada, where work visas, bills, and the 9-to-5 grind had quietly pushed music to the side. Standing there before the show, the three of them decided it couldn’t stay that way.
“We collectively realized that there was more to life than this. We had to play music. Bass, drums and vocals, that would be it.”
The idea was to play the heaviest, grooviest doom they could manage, meet twice a week, drink a few beers, and complain about the adult lives they’d chosen. SEUM โ Venom in Arabic, French slang for disappointment and frustration โ was the word for the complaining part.
New Orleans-inspired sludge with punk energy layered into it. The plan from there was familiar from every band they’d been in before: jam, record a demo, toss it on Bandcamp unannounced, beg for a gig, cry about no one showing up.
Covid derailed that template. With no chance of playing live, the band treated the tragedy as accidental permission to rethink everything. They released each song from their demo separately with its own artwork. They coordinated a split live stream with Rexxar, an Indonesian band. They pressed a hand-made split 7″ across France, the US, and Canada.
“The crazier the idea, the more willing we were to do it. We were stuck at home or in our practice room and creativity was our only outlet.”
That stretch produced “Summer of SEUM” (EP, 2020), the SEUM / Fatima split (2020), and the first full-length “Winterized” in June 2021, which landed at #18 on the Doom-Charts for that month.
The release show for “Winterized” happened at Paul Boutique, the record store where they’d dropped copies for the owner’s distro.
Paul offered to book a release party in the store’s backroom, with local doom band Katรถ opening. Kids, punks, and metalheads filled the room on the night โ the band had no real friends in the scene yet, but a Covid-starved crowd showed up anyway, thirsty for something loud and sweaty.
The lesson stuck: you could just make things happen. They started booking their own shows at Barfly, Traxxide (now called Thrashcan), and Hemisphere Gauche, crossing paths with Montreal bands like Cell Press, Ratpiss, and Obelisk.
Shows under bridges, in friends’ living rooms, at a DIY festival called Truck Stop that got shut down by the police. After years in Europe, where a single gig could take months of emails to book, the Montreal pace felt like another world.
The second album “DOUBLE DOUBLE”, out February 2023, came out of that shift. They’d been describing their sound as doom’n’bass โ informed by Montreal’s long, merciless winters โ but the live reactions pushed them toward shorter, faster, gnarlier songs with stronger hooks.
The EP “Blueberry Cash” dropped between the two albums in 2022. To promote “DOUBLE DOUBLE”, the band stencilled the city and invited fans to repost the artwork, eventually inviting whoever had tracked down the most stencils to a private show in the SEUM jam space.
The postering and sticking habits were borrowed from Prowl and other local hardcore bands. “DOUBLE DOUBLE” finished at #14 on the Doom-Charts for February 2023.
Live releases sit alongside the studio stuff: “Live from the SEUM-cave” (2020) charted at #27 on the Doom-Charts in September 2021, and “Live AT CJLO” was tracked on March 12th, 2023 at CJLO 1690AM during the station’s “Grade A Explosives” show. In 2025 came the split album “Conjuring” with Temple of the Fuzz Witch on Black Throne Productions.
All of this was happening as Montreal kept changing โ condos going up, historic venues closing, Airbnb thinning neighborhoods. SEUM switched most of their bookings to pay-what-you-can and started running more all-ages events, trying to give something back to the scene that had opened doors for them.
“Since we will all end in a casket, we might as well dance on our way to it.”
What had started as a weed-smoking doom band had drifted closer to a sludge punk outfit with a hands-on approach. “Parking Life”, out April 23rd, is the record that lands there. The band describe it as their attempt at a midlife nightmare escape โ songs about unfulfilling careers, broken relationships, and the meaninglessness of it all. The first single, “Labrador“, came out on March 27th and signals a clear shift: this is the first SEUM record where clean vocals sit this prominently.
“Adding clean vocals felt like the natural evolution to our musical explorations of fun and disappointment. Feeding ourselves with the reactions of the crowd, we wanted to build songs that would feel close to the fans and allow them to join us on the chorus.”
“You are SEUM,” as they keep telling the room from the stage.
The touring year ahead pulls them across both continents: the already in the books Stoner Fest III in Sherbrooke on April 10th, an upcoming Montreal show at Toscadura on May 2nd, dates through the Maritimes in mid-May, the Lourd Festival in Gatineau on June 6th, and a return to France with a show at High Voltage in Lille on June 22nd.
Wyลwietl ten post na Instagramie
werwer
๐ IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal ๐๐ SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter ยท Instagram ยท Facebook ยท X (Twitter) ยท Threads ยท Bluesky ยท Messenger ยท WhatsApp.
