Born in the bleak isolation of the secluded prairie city of Edmonton, Canada, Homeshake’s Peter Sagar worked with friends in a number of local bands be-fore picking up and moving to Montreal in 2011 to begin recording under the Homeshake moniker. Following two self- released cassettes (The Homeshake Tapes and Dynamic Meditation) and two acclaimed full lengths (In The Shower and Midnight Snack), Sagar cracks a window open with his third album for Sinderlyn – Fresh Air.

Started immediately following the recording of Midnight Snack, Fresh Air continues Sagar’s exploration of dreamy, downtempo bedroom R&B and draws inspiration from such disparate artists like Sade, The Band, Broadcast, Prince, and Angelo Badalamenti. As the title Fresh Air suggests, Sagar’s songs were created to clear his listeners’ minds of negativity. Full of smokey, laid back love songs and airy productions, Sagar’s decidedly stoned sound is a breath of fresh air.

TRACK LISTING

1 Hello Welcome
2 Call Me Up
3 Not U
4 Every Single Thing
5 Wrapping Up
6 Getting Down, Pt. II (He's Cooling Down)
7 Timing
8 TV Volume
9 Khmlwugh
10 Fresh Air
11 Serious
12 So She
13 This Way
14 Signing Off

Peter Sagar — also known as Homeshake wrote the majority of his fifth studio album, Under the Weather, in 2019, when he was going through a long, unrelenting period of sadness. “I was in a deep, deep depression,” he recalls of that time period now. Sagar and his partner were living in Montreal, and while everyone was out being social, he was inside listening to ambient music, binging Star Trek, and writing songs. (Sound familiar?) “It was a bit of a dark pit,” he says. “That’s kind of what the whole album is about.”

Under the Weather is hazy and moody, the pace slow as syrup, and from beginning to end, a fog falls over every synth and guitar line. “Oftentimes when you’re in a dark place, you’re supposed to journal and that helps release the pressure,” Sagar says. “For me, it always found its way into the music.”

Capturing the cloudy sound of a depressive funk was no simple feat, especially in the headspace Sagar was in for over a year. For that reason, he decided to enlist his friend, Jerry Paper ’s Lucas Nathan, to help with production on the record. Having Nathan contribute helped Sagar dial back some of the “dry, pristine digital sound” that defined his fourth studio album, Helium , and add back personal analog touches that drew people to the HOMESHAKE project in the first place.

As Sagar readies for the album’s release this September, the record he wrote about feeling isolated, alone, and despondent has begun to seem eerily prescient. “I’ve been writing about feeling isolated my whole life,” he says — but with age, he has come to understand them better. “I had a fairly clear idea what the album was going to be like based on where I was emotionally at the time,” he says about Under the Weather . “I just try to make music that is honest about how I’m feeling.”

TRACK LISTING

01. Wake Up!
02. Feel Better
03. Vacuum
04. I Know I Know I Know
05. Inaminit
06. Careful
07. Mindless
08. Spend It
09. Half Asleep After The Movies
10. Passenger Seat
11. Tenterhooks
12. Reboot!

When you walk alone, you’re never lost. At least, that’s the operating principle behind Homeshake, the recording project of Peter Sagar. Over his first three albums, Sagar followed his own idiosyncratic vision, a journey that’s taken him from sturdy guitar-based indie-pop to, on 2017’s Fresh Air, a blearyeyed take on lo-fi R&B. Now, with Helium, Sagar is putting down roots in aesthetic territory all his own. Landscape that he once viewed from a distance now forms the bedrock of his sound, and from here, he looks back out at the world as if through a light fog, composing songs that feel grounded and intimate, even as they explore a dispersed feeling of isolation.

It’s a feeling that comes through not only in the gauziness of the production, but also in the vulnerability of the songs themselves. Sagar began writing Helium shortly after completing Fresh Air, and in the middle of what he calls a “binge” reading of Haruki Murakami. It’s not hard to picture the narrator of these songs as a distinctly Murakamian character: He moves through time by himself, bemused by and insulated from a world he doesn’t quite seem to have been made for. Everyone Sagar encounters here — including himself — seems to be a step removed from present reality, whether by technology (“Anything At All”), solitude (“Just Like My”), or sweet fantasy (“Like Mariah”). The record is stitched together by a series of instrumental interludes, synthesizer explorations whose haziness adds to the suspicion that this is all an uncanny dream.

Which isn’t to say that Sagar is unmoored in his own world. In fact, much of Helium is the result of what he calls “a much clearer mental state” than the one he’d experienced shortly following Fresh Air’s completion. “I had a better idea of the sound that was working for this record and what it was turning into as I was writing the songs,” he says. That’s owing in part to the album’s genesis. Where his previous three records were recorded directly to one-inch tape in a local studio, Helium was recorded and mixed by Sagar alone in his apartment in Montreal’s Little Italy neighborhood between April and June of this year. Freed of the rigid editing process he’d endured before, he was able to lose himself in pursuit of tone and texture. “I didn’t have to book time, compete for good hours, wait on availability. I did a lot of it at home in the middle of the night,” he says. “It made me get more obsessive about details.”

A budding interest in ambient and experimental music — particularly Visible Cloaks, DJs Paypal and Rashad, and Jlin — pushed him to tinker with the micro-sounds that surround the songs here. It’s a process he found creatively invigorating; even the tinkling boom-bap of Young Thug informs “All Night Long.” It’s a far cry from the chorus-laden guitars of his earlier work. “Ever since I started introducing synthesizers into my music, I’ve gotten more interested in texture,” he says. “I’d hit a creative dead end [with guitars], so synths took over.” The warm chords of a Roland Juno 60 form the album’s base, and gave him a clean palette with which to work. “No tape hiss, no humming power outlets and shitty mixing boards,” as he puts it. “Everything just came out nice and pure.”

Still, for all the growth it demonstrates, Helium is at its core a singer-songwriter’s record made by someone who doesn’t feel beholden to any particular set of sounds, textures, or instruments to get his point across. In that sense, it feels closer to the bone, at once assured of its vision and remarkably vulnerable. It’s perhaps our purest view yet of Homeshake’s home country.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Low-key funky basses and woozy keys, smoothly rolling along underneath Sagar's perfectly ethereal vocals. Pieces like 'All Night Long' are at once wistful and dynamic, smoothly segueing between longing odes and syncopated, rhythmic lo-fi indie. Just as comfortable playing at home as in a darkened lounge-bar with a whiskey in hand, and a half-composed text message hanging in the balance.

TRACK LISTING

01 Early
02 Anything At All
03 Like Mariah
04 Heartburn
05 All Night Long
06 Trudi And Lou
07 Just Like My
08 Nothing Could Be Better
09 Other Than
10 Salu Says Hi
11 Another Thing
12 Couch Cushion
13 (Secret Track)