Royal Canoe

Royal Canoe are musical mad scientists from Winnipeg, blending rock, pop and hip hop to create a put-on-your-dancing-shoes sound that is truly their own.

Not to be confused with Royal Canoe Club, the oldest canoe club in the world, Royal Canoe are six-guys taking the world by storm with their genre-defying sound. The last two months saw them touring with indie darlings Alt-J and Tricky across North America (hitting some Canadian dates, too) AND marked the release of their much-anticipated new album, Today We’re Believers, in the beginning of September.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/85987488″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

As if they weren’t on enough of a high, they can also add playing Danny Masterson’s backyard and catching the ear of Jay-Z when a remix of their single “Bathtubs” by Alek.Fin appeared on his blog to the list of things to be on Cloud 9 about.

Royal Canoe is pretty fearless when it comes to bending sonic boundaries, and Today We’re Believers is a true testament. Leaning heavily into the urban side of things, it can be likened to cruising the downtown core at night, sliding under streetlights and letting the warm Manitoba summer invade your space. The video for “Bathtubs”, directed by Nathan Booey, has also seen its fair share of praise appearing on influential design and video blogs. Foraying further into cross-category musical genius status, Royal Canoe has even performed Beck’s “Song Reader Collection” as a part of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival. No wonder they were declared in “Top Bands” and “25 Bands To Watch” at SXSW 2013. We had a chance to catch up with the band and get their take on music, Toronto and of course, beer:

You’re about to play a show at the MOD Club in Toronto on October 6th. Is there anything you look forward to most when coming to our fair city?

We have a lot of friends in Toronto, so it is always really nice to catch up when we are in town. We generally hit Saving Gigi for some food at some point and Mascot for a coffee.

Collective Art Brewing has a pretty unique concept of pairing artists with craft brews; how did you feel the first time you saw your label on a beer bottle? 

We were pretty excited! We had a friend from Collective bring us a bottle when we were in Toronto a week ago. It was pretty awesome to see, the video popping up on our phones was some serious space age shit. And it was nice to be on a very tasty EPA.

Well, we definitely want to thank you and other artists like yourselves for collaborating with us and bringing together art and beer. Makes us pretty excited, too.

Your new album, Today We’re Believers, came out earlier this month. If you can sum it up in one word (or phrase), what would it be?

Cerebral synth-y swagger.

Toronto fans can rejoice: they’ll be in Toronto on October 6th with Tricky at The Mod Club. You can check out the rest of their tour dates here.

Attention Tricky and Royal Canoe fans: It’s been announced that their North American tour has been cancelled for reasons unforeseen. Royal Canoe is still very much trying to make this happen – visit www.royalcanoe.com or their Facebook page for further updates and developments.