This CD is an ambient re-imagining of all the tunes from 2025’s critically acclaimed 'The Besnard Lakes Are the Ghost Nation'. Will you hear vocals? Nope. Any drums? Not so much. Atmospheric instrumental presentations? That's the gist! Available only on CD in a limited run, these songs strip the originals to their spectral core, ideal for those in search of meditative, cinematic and gently haunting atmospheres.

TRACK LISTING

1. Calling Ghostly Nations (Ghost Mix)
2. Chemin de la Baie (Ghost Mix)
3. Carried It All Around (Ghost Mix) 
4. Pontiac Spirits (Ghost Mix) 
5. Battle Lines (Ghost Mix) 
6. The Clouds are Casting Shadows from the Sunlight (Ghost Mix)
7. Give Us Our Dominion (Ghost Mix)

On their new album 'The Besnard Lakes are the Ghost Nation', Montreal’s The Besnard Lakes return with their post-rock psych; but this time around, with a lightness and optimism at play.

Unique among their furrowed brow peers, The Besnard Lakes are unafraid to marry textured, questing headphone sonics to the honeyed pleasure of radio hits past: the rapture of My Bloody Valentine entwined with the romance of Fleetwood Mac. Imagine dreamy Beach House riding Led Zeppelin dynamics, with unabashedly androgynous vocal harmonies; a melodic yet mountainous sound world.

In a crowded leaderboard of their own making, 'The Besnard Lakes are the Ghost Nation' might just be their best album yet; a strive for hope when it is needed most.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Like fellow Montrealers GYBE, The Besnard Lakes revel in the sort of slowly blooming wall-of-sound chaos we hear on their stunning new LP, but unlike GYBE there's a levity and melodic anchor in a soaring, haunting shoegazey vocal performance. A beautifully rich, endlessly growing wonder that draws on their established sound but pulls the peripheries out even further into rippling ambient and even in parts, noisy rock.

Andy says: This is a really beautiful album which combines post-rock with a touch of psych and even gently pulsing shoegaze. The band have created a warm and enveloping sound world studded with gorgeous twinkling songs.

TRACK LISTING

1. Calling Ghostly Nations
2. Chemin De La Baie
3. Carried It All Around
4. In Hollywood
5. Pontiac Spirits
6. Battle Lines
7. The Clouds Are Casting Shadows From The Sunlight
8. Give Us Our Dominion

The story of The Besnard Lakes begins at Besnard Lake: a spectacular yet secluded water feature in rural Saskatchewan which the Montreal group’s husband and wife core, Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, visit each summer for inspiration and escape. This year the couple’s campsite was surrounded for a worrying few days by forest flames, a literal ring of fire which informed the devil-may-care spirit of their exuberant fifth album.

“Besnard Lake is usually the place where we get the germination of ideas,” explains Jace. “We set up a small recording rig in the trailer we have up there .This time there were also helicopters with giant water tanks flying over us while we were fishing on the lake!”

Armed with demos and memories from their trip, the pair returned to the city and entered Breakglass Studios. Co-founded by Lasek a decade ago, this popular recording facility has long been a hub for Montreal’s fertile, collaborative and proudly DIY music community. Having met and fallen in love in Vancouver, where Jace was a photography-trained art student and Olga a bass-slinging star on the underground rock circuit, the pair relocated at the turn of the millennium. Vancouver had gotten too expensive. By contrast, “Montreal was super cheap because there had been the Quebec referendum in ’95 and a lot of the Anglos had left. There was a political teeter-totter happening, so there were tons of empty places. We moved out here and were able to live, rehearse and record in a loft for next to nothing.”

The predominantly French-speaking province’s economic depression birthed an ever-evolving scene that’s become internationally renowned for such disparate independent avatars as Godspeed You! Black Emperor and The Arcade Fire. Unique among their furrowed brow peers, The Besnard Lakes are unafraid to marry textured, questing headphone sonics to the honeyed pleasure of radio hits past: the rapture of My Bloody Valentine entwined with the romance of Fleetwood Mac. (Echoing prime FM they actually now have two girl/boy couplings in the line-up, keyboard player Sheenah Ko and guitarist Robbie MacArthur joining powerhouse drummer Kevin Laing and non-touring studio axe hero Richard White.) Imagine dreamy Beach House riding Led Zeppelin dynamics, with unabashedly androgynous vocal harmonies. This melodic yet mountainous soundworld was sculpted at Breakglass, their own modest Paisley Park. As the longterm sporter of a Love Symbol tattoo, Prince’s pop alchemy is especially potent for Jace.

“You look on the back of his early records and it’s produced, arranged, recorded and performed by Prince. When I realised that as a 12-year-old I was like, Oh fuck! So this kid can make a record all by himself. So then why can’t I? He was also the guy who made me realise that it was ok to sing high. Just throw caution to the wind. He’s not concerned about being super macho. Once I started getting into punk rock in high school, Prince was still there. He didn’t lose relevancy for me. Prince was still there when I started getting into prog rock, too. We’re just absorbed in music of all sorts.”

Olga, meanwhile, has been exploring a new creative outlet via her domestic interpretation of the occult, inspired by a Disinformation lecture given by comic book writer Grant Morrison. “He was talking about sigils,” remembers her adoring partner. “It was really personal for Oggy, like a meditation she would do in the morning, and also just a fun thing. She developed these 11 sigils, which you can see on the inside of the record’s jacket. For the deluxe edition she’s hand engraved them onto these little tags. The meanings are very simple: one is love, another is empathy. That leads back to this whole idea of mystery and the myth of the band.”

Channelling their obsessions with the paranormal – Jace was a teenage ghost hunter – as well as the dark arts, A Coliseum Complex Museum is populated by cryptozoological creatures (The Bray Road Beast, Golden Lion) while also luxuriating in natural phenomena and beauty (The Plain Moon, Nightingale). These themes are sincere yet good-humoured. The LP’s title jokily refers to a landmark-heavy road sign spotted on tour in Texas, the varied emotional impulses within reflected by its environmentally warped artwork.

“For a long time we were trying to keep secret that we love being out in nature,” admits Jace. “Because it’s kinda cliché. But with this record we decided to stop fighting what we love so much. So the front cover actually has a lake on it, but it’s also got this giant orb shooting light into the water, which is creating a hole that’s opening a portal to the coliseum complex museum. It’s kinda fucked.”

TRACK LISTING

1. The Bray Road Beast
2. The Golden Lion
3. Pressure Of Our Plans
4. Towers Sent Her To Sheets Of Sound
5. The Plain Moon
6. Necronomicon
7. Nightingale
8. Tungsten 4: The Refugee

Released to coincide with their forthcoming UK dates and in advance of their highly anticipated new album, ‘A Coliseum Complex Museum’, here is the brand new 12” from The Besnard Lakes.

The single features prime album cut ‘Golden Lion’ alongside two exclusive tracks.

This is the band at their absolute best - desnse, soaring guitars, harmonies to die for and handsdown the best chorus they’ve ever written. This 12” sows the seeds for a stellar 2016 for The Besnard Lakes.

The Besnard Lakes’ ‘Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO’ had its humble beginnings in mid-2011 and was completed over the course of a year. Ever mindful and attentive to the most subtle and nuanced details, founding band members Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas produced, recorded and mixed at the stalwart Breakglass Studios in Montreal with long time bandmates Kevin Laing and Richard White.

Eventually mastered by the renowned Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound, this fourth album by The Besnard Lakes features heavyweight additions by Moonface’s Spencer Krug and Mike Bigelow, The Barr Brothers’ Sarah Page, the always enchanting Monica Guenter and the return of The Fifth String Liberation Singers’ Choir.

Each of the eight tracks on the album takes off, coasts, and lands smoothly, with a jubilant slowburn of its own momentum for the benefit of the larger picture.

The Besnard Lakes create a distinct and dreamy headspace, an enigmatic and somehow familiar placelessness. It happens in such a way that both the close and casual listener find themselves immersed in the generous sonic vision, one moment as timeless as the next.

“A magnificently oceanic meld of Beach Boys harmonies, My Bloody Valentine tidal waves and Phil Spector girlgroup siren songs shot through with soaring guitar.” - Rolling Stone

“Right now no one is making music this grand, this big, this moving with so much assurance.” - Chicago Tribune

“Nothing short of beautiful.” - NME

There is a war now. The message has been sent through short wave in code. The Besnard Lakes twisting chronicle, or fever dream, of spies, double agents, novelists and aspiring rock gods has turned violent. Loyalty, dishonor, love, hatred all seen through the eyes of two spies, fighting a war that may not be real. One follows the other as they receive coded messages and spread destruction. The city is burning, and it's to the benefit of music obsessives everywhere. Once again, the husband-and-wife duo of Olga Goreas and Jace Lasek has crafted a majestic, sprawling vision of guitar bombast and captivating pop experiments.

"The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night" calls upon the influence of ELO and finer parts of the Alan Parsons Project in its orchestration. Still helped by the Ghost of Beach Boys Past, the album is more Dennis Wilson than Brian, and more Peter Green Fleetwood Mac than Lindsay Buckingham. That said, standout track "Albatross" has all the swagger of a Stevie Nicks-led Fleetwood Mac classic or Roy Orbison re-imagined as a rollicking, snakeskin-booted Mazzy Star - dousing it all in gas and throwing the match as we hear its tale of Vancouver's skid row and its inhabitants.

The album is a dark bliss-out that folds the eerie guitar epics of the Montreal band's breakthrough into a wall of affected drones and atmospherics, but with a toughened immediacy and grit that gives the form a much-needed shove over the cliffs, making for a haunting, provocative swan dive into the crushing tide.