Your music carries the unmistakable echoes of dark-wave and post-punk. Do you think these genres are often misunderstood or under appreciated in today’s music landscape?

NOLAN: That’s hard to answer. I do think this style of music is more popular now than it has been in decades and the scene is flourishing in a lot of ways. The Cure’s new record hit number 1, all these bands like Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Lebanon Hannover, Actors, French Police, Haunt Me, countless countless others touring, selling out places, playing huge festivals across the world. It gives me a shred of hope for smaller bands in the future. It tells me there’s not just an audience for post-punk/coldwave/whatever you call it music, but it’s having a bit of a renaissance in the underground. That being said, is it under-appreciated? Our media consumption is so fragmented compared to previous generations. When you trade monocultures for billions of self-contained algorithmic bubbles, it’s difficult for me to say what today’s musical landscape even is. When I read discussions of AI in the media, it makes me think art is not just under-appreciated, but completely misunderstood and seen as totally disposable by a lot of society.

TUCKER: I’m not so much losing sleep over genres in 2025 as I am reorganizing my cupboards in the pantry over long weekends, but I do think the genres (darkwave and post-punk) are a bit misleading if you’re getting specific. It seems everything is swimming in the same pissy pool now, which makes sense as it’s not 1979 (‘The Weeknd’ on a Post-Punk playlist on Spotify does scratch the bone a little). Gens whatever seem to throw it all under the goth banner and not care so much for labeling genres or understanding them. The sound I know, has evolved and it’s completely normal to change, but somehow I feel I am being cheated out of the origins of what that scene was originally about. My roots to the scene are very hardwired that way. I gotta say though, it seems like forever since younger audience’s are expressing themselves again through the goth/post-punk music scene like they are now. It’s always been an outlet to be an individual through art, music, even politically. That gives me hope, but I care very little about the small things in life.

Toronto’s music scene has a history of fostering creativity but isn’t typically associated with darkwave and post-punk. How has the city influenced your music, and do you feel like outsiders in your own hometown?

NOLAN: I was actually just talking to a local bookkeeper in Toronto about the Toronto punk scene starting in the late 70s with the Viletones, The Diodes, Teenage Head, then Bunchof*ckinggoofs in the 80s, that’s what comes to mind when I think of Toronto’s musical history. You’re correct that as far as darkwave bands go, historically there haven’t been too many coming out of Toronto. We had tons of retro, goth, synth and minimal synth events in the late 90s and early 2000s, but no bands to speak of that I’m aware of. TRAITRS came from a thriving local indie scene in Toronto’s west end in the mid-2010s. A small group of diy labels like Pleasence Records, Hand Drawn Dracula, Buzz Records and Telephone Explosion (to name a few) gave outsider artists a platform to explore a wider range of non-mainstream sounds from weirdo art-pop, shoegaze, dream pop, punk, hardcore, techno and in our case, wave and post-punk. The thing was we never fit on any bills back then and experienced a lot of difficulty touring in our home country. We learned to create our own opportunities and do everything ourselves with likeminded driven people. It took time but we found audience eventually, it just so happened Europe caught on before Canada and the rest of North America.

TUCKER: Post-Punk has always been dead in Toronto, though every 41st person is wearing a shirt from the late Mancunian band Joy Division. It’s fuel is the mainstream anything and everything, but 1980’s Toronto did have a thriving New Wave/Goth/industrial scene exporting many artists internationally (Blue Peter, Skinny Puppy and Spoons) with the support of the beloved Much Music. Today, I very much accept we are the outsiders in our hometown. Everything creatively I know is within myself. It’s just a place I live. When the snow falls I write, so maybe it’s inspired me more than I think.

Post-punk has always thrived on reinterpreting pain and melancholy into something profoundly beautiful. How do you personally process darker emotions through your creative work?

TUCKER: “But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. … For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.” Oscar Wilde

Life, sadness, death, love and time. It’s all so frustratingly fragile. At an early age I was drawn to films, photography, music, art that provoked something in me. I was a boy wearing Hatful of Hollow and Holiday in Cambodia t-shirt like a coat hanger model. Morrissey pushed lyrical sadness beautifully and conveyed it to the world. Ian Curtis’s balance of life and death displayed fragility and strength. The tortured brilliance of truth. If I don’t feel it, I’m not interested and the audience won’t feel it either. I’m a complete realist. We exist everyday pushing away the inevitable..how it will it end for you, me, loved ones, will the sun shine or will it rain? That’s the forever question. Morality is beautifully morbid.

NOLAN: I read a lot, write a lot, playing music helps me focus my attention on somewhere else. The late-great David Lynch says you don’t have to be suffering to convey suffering. It’s important to understand the dark side of reality, know it’s there, but not let it consume and destroy you. The latter part is tricky.

Your albums often feel like journeys through loss, alienation, and redemption. Do you approach each record with a clear thematic vision, or do those ideas evolve organically as you write?

TUCKER: For me I would describe it as searching for a clear view in a snowstorm. Never ever have I written a concept album but they seem to almost form like that and come back full circle. I have themes or moods I need to explore then share with this sick bruised world. I am very visual so I interpret it initially through album artwork, album title or simply song titles. I’m collecting lyrics consistently. I sometimes feel I’m collecting hurt and humanity’s heartache but it helps shape the world I need to create. The only frustration I have is constantly chasing some strange childhood feeling of how the rain felt or the skies looked and getting others to feel it or see it too. The itch that can’t be scratched. I have this need to direct the mood like a storm chaser. All of the vocal melodies are written organically but the music is always written before this process. I pitched the idea to Nolan about releasing the next record as an EP of only slow sad songs following ‘Horses in the Abattoir’. Collectively we decided to switch the EP into an LP which is in its early mixing state.

NOLAN: Musically, thematically, lyrically, we leave room for change, room to try things on a whim, our albums take many different shapes while they’re written. That’s been a part of our process since the very beginning.

The balance between minimalism and intricacy is striking in yourmusic. Do you find more power in what you leave unsaid—or, in this case, unplayed?

NOLAN: A lot of my personal musical influences on the last record came from minimalist composer Phillip Glass actually. I listen to all kinds of music, including experimental composers like William Basinski, jazz artists like Alice Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Sun Ra, krautrock bands like Can, This Heat, Faust, Broadcast is another huge influence. The commonality I find with all these different artists is the use of minimalism, space and repetition. Some of our best songs came from simple drum and synth loops, guitar layers, minimal piano pieces, atmospheric and atonal layers. Sounds and simplicity provoke us and change our ideas. When you put yourself in different musical headspace, we find it enriches the ideas we come up with in our home studios and when it comes time to record.

The title of your album Horses in the Abattoir is both visceral and poetic. Can you walk us through its significance and how it frames the album’s themes?

NOLAN: The album title was inspired by Meat Is Murder by The Smiths, a hugely inspirational album for both of us. The idea of existence itself being disposable fodder fed into a meat grinder to satiate our corporate theocratic overlords. Destroying everything beautiful for the sake of money and consumption. Over-consumption. The frailty of life, nature and the human experience.

TUCKER: It’s our Meat is Murder. I’m a strong believer of animal welfare and rights. The title blatantly confesses to what happens to horses/animals behind the scenes and yet stretches beyond that metaphorically on a full world scale. It’s what we as humans hide behind our gods and corporations. I just don’t know how many people right now are out there murdering, skinning, frying up their family, cat or dog and serving it up to your children for family day dinner?

Many post-punk and dark-wave artists draw heavily from cinematic influences. Are there specific films, directors, or visual aesthetics that inspire your creative process or the atmosphere of your work?

TUCKER: Currently I’ve been pretty inspired by works by Andrei Tarkovsky, Gaspar Noe, Brandon Cronenberg, Alain Delon, Martin Parr, Nick Hedges, Shelagh Delaney, Frantisek Vlácil, Andrzej Zulawski, François Truffaut, David Lynch, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, Osgood Perkins, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Evald Schorm, My Wife, Tenement Housing, Věra Chytilová, Jean Renoir, Jack the Ripper, Jaromil Jireš, Jean-Luc Godard, Anthony Perkins, Stanley Kubrick, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Steven Patrick Morrissey, Albert Finney, all the rainy days when I lived in London and crying alone. Arthouse/Horror/French Extremity/Foreign New Wave/Giallo/Noir.