Corridor’s teenage crisis

On a fabulous start with the release of his album Junior, in 2019, Corridor was slowed down by the pandemic, then reinvigorated by constraints and finally wanting to do everything differently this time, for its fourth record. Five years later, the Montreal group presents Mimi.

We are seated at the 180g café-record store, avenue De Lorimier, in Montreal. With us, the four members of Corridor, Dominic Berthiaume, Jonathan Robert, Julien Bakvis and Samuel Gougoux. The latter was not present the last time we met the group, in 2019, for the release of the record Junior. At the time, Samuel was performing on stage with Corridor. Then, the musicians decided that it would be natural for him to join the group, which then became a trio.

“The transition went well,” says Samuel, who admits to being a fan of Corridor from the start. “I had a vision of what I could achieve. The guys listened to me and gave me my place. The fact that we were obliged to have a different process allowed me to suggest that we produce it ourselves, I felt that we were capable of doing it. »

This “different process”, namely making the album almost without instruments initially, because they could not get together due to the pandemic, allowed them a lot of things in terms of the evolution of their sound . Samuel’s previous work, which has long been immersed in electronic music, also played an important role.

Following the launch of his third album Junior, under the prestigious label of the record label Sub Pop, Corridor had the wind in its sails. Critical praise. A long international tour ahead of him. It was in 2020. “It was super busy for us,” says Dominic Berthiaume. But, like everyone else, everything was canceled. »

That summer, the group rented a chalet in the Laurentians. “We started writing down ideas. It wasn’t tunes yet, but riffs, melodies, a lot of stuff that was done at that time and that we were able to reuse to build (the album),” says Samuel.

Rather than composing with instruments, musicians mainly worked from music software, in front of a computer. It was a work of assembly, rather than an album of band, recorded live.

Those who have followed Corridor since the beginning will hear it right away: while keeping everything organic in its rock and post-punk composition, always filled with guitars, the group brought synthesizers and a complexity of in-depth textures, which flirts with dream pop.

Grow

In the window to our right, a poster advertising Taylor Swift’s new album blocks the light. Dominic, who works at 180g, explains to us with a laugh that the owner was expecting a simple QR code in the window, but that a poster the size of the window instead arrived the day before. As several times during the interview, the conversation deviates a little, the musicians exchange ideas with each other between questions, and also ask us questions. Formed in 2010, the group is a tight unit in which each member brings their personality and their energy. Dominic usually takes the lead in responding. But when we approach the texts, all written by Jonathan, it is his turn.

“The trigger was quite precise,” says Jonathan Robert. “I came back from Canadian Tire with a leaf blower. I found myself in the middle of my yard wondering who I am, what had happened. I looked into the distance and heard my daughter. And in the evening, we would go to dinner with our friends and talk about mortgage rates. In the same week, I was shopping for life insurance with my girlfriend. We snapped our fingers and we all became different people. »

Jonathan Robert speaks, with a smile on his lips, of “the antithesis of the rockstar dream that we were promised”. And if, yes, these findings are striking, they are not necessarily negative, he specifies. The important thing is to find a balance. In his words, therefore, he addresses all of this. Death, growing old, family, money you don’t have…

The “multigenerational group in adolescent crisis”

Corridor has grown. Press releases about the album’s release use the somewhat overused term “maturity”, but Jonathan Robert calls it “metamorphosis”. Between two quips about André 3000’s new album – “it’s good, but no one would talk about it if it wasn’t him who made it,” observes Dominic – and a few jokes about age gaps between the members of the group, they come back to the fact that Mimi is already their fourth album, in 10 years of existence.

“We were wondering what we were doing here. We heard them, the gling-gling of our guitars! Where are we going now? You don’t want to get bored of yourself, but you don’t want to distort the project either,” says Dominic.

Jonathan jokingly describes this desire to do things differently, to bring something new into creation, as an “adolescent crisis”.

When they talk about it, the musicians explain that they had to go completely elsewhere for this fourth album, rebel against some of their creative habits and do as they please. “After that you calm down a little and you find a happy medium,” says Jonathan.

Thus was born Mimi, named after Jonathan Robert’s cat. This album was a long time in the making. And for good reason, the pandemic brought such uncertainty that the musicians did not know if it was worth making another record right away.

When things started to move again, they actively got back to work (Jonathan, for his part, released two records with his Jonathan Personne project) and then took their time to refine the eight songs “that went well together”, in making the album themselves for the first time.

The next step, the tour, will take them to Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom. In a few places in Quebec as well, even if musicians now say bluntly that they will not try to present shows in empty halls throughout the province to try to “convince” the public here. “We won’t make foie gras, we can’t put it down people’s throats, we’ll go where we’re asked,” summarizes Jonathan.

There are many Corridor fans in Quebec. The shows in Montreal or at festivals demonstrate this, illustrates Julien. But the craze does not compare to what it is outside the border. Without trying to explain it too much, the members of the group accept this state of affairs. What if the wind were to turn? “So much the better, we’ll be happy,” they tell us.

Check out the band’s Bandcamp page