A turning point for Drew came with the Paris terror attacks of November 2015, which made him feel the world needed an injection of positivity: “It just sort of made us want to go out there and play. Drew’s co-founder Brendan Canning was keen, but Drew and fellow BSS lifer Charles Spearin took more persuading. “He just didn’t give up he just kept saying, ‘You’ve got to strike, you’ve got to do this, the time is now,’ and so finally we agreed.”Īs might be expected to be the case with a many-headed hydra of a group, getting all the principals to agree wasn’t easy. “He started showing up at our label, asking if we were going to make an album,” Drew recalls. But the idea that they might turn their hand to something more than greatest-hits sets had been stirring since November 2014, when producer Joe Chiccarelli told Drew the group needed to make a new album. Its title, Drew says, captured what he wanted people to feel about the group’s comeback, and how they sound playing together again: “It’s just such a wonderful sentiment about us, coming in like a hug of thunder.”īroken Social Scene had reconvened, in varying forms, several times over the past four years – the odd festival show here and there, preferably ones that involved the least possible travelling. The title track on its own might just be the best thing you will hear all year – a song that will become as beloved as “Anthems For a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” from their breakthrough album, You Forgot It In People. It is righteous but warm, angry but loving, melodic but uncompromising. On Hug of Thunderthe 15 members of Broken Social Scene – well, the 15 who play on the record, including returnees Leslie Feist and Emily Haines – refract their varying emotions, methods and techniques into something that doesn’t just equal their other albums, but surpasses them. They have that right because they have created one of 2017’s most sparkling, multi-faceted albums. But with Hug of Thunder, the fifth Broken Social Scene album, Drew and his bandmates have a right to feel presumptuous. “I don’t want to go out there being presumptuous,” Kevin Drew says, “because, I’ve worn those presumptuous shoes before, and you don’t want it to feel like, ‘Oh, what a let-down.’” That’s the fear when you bring back one of music’s most beloved names seven years after their last album.
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