Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, Coup D’état is the New Music Monday highlight!
Coup D’état brands their music as “real ‘fake emo’” and began when Freyja Internicola and Lily Wilson started playing music together and trying to get a band off the ground, but nothing came of their efforts at first.
Then last year, Internicola had a close friend pass away, which pushed her to start writing more and bring the band together.
“It gave me a lot of passion and a lot to write about,” Internicola told Victoria Buzz.
The result was Coup D’état, which is comprised of Internicola on vocals and guitar, Wilson also on drums and vocals and lastly, Raine Sommerville on bass and vocals.
Once they had formed up in March of 2024, things moved quite quickly for Coup D’état.
“We just didn’t stop writing,” explained Internicola. “We had the record finished around July, with all the songs ready to go.”
They quickly got into the studio and had everything recorded by the end of October and eventually released their debut album What Happens After The Epilogue…? in December.
This release was monumental for the band and the momentum behind it hasn’t changed much since its release.
Currently, it is still charting at number seven on CFUV’s Loud charts and has been on and off their Top 30 charts since being released.
Internicola says that she wrote the majority of the lyrics for Coup D’état’s songs on this album, but they still always approach the music collaboratively.
In dealing with the loss of her friend though, writing these songs was helpful in the healing process.
“A lot of these songs were just me getting a lot of things out,” she said.
“It’s a big one for me, songs like ‘New Hampshire Does Not Exist,’ ‘Losing Meaning,’ a bit of ‘A Promise From the Barrel of a .357,’ are the big ones.”
Although writing these songs was helpful, Internicola says they have recently retired the song “Losing Meaning” because every time they played it, it re-opened the wounds of grief they have been trying to get through.
In addition to writing about her own grief, Internicola also put together a song about one of her favorite books for this album. The song “[],” or “Holloway” was written about the Mark Z. Danielewski novel, House of Leaves.
“It’s just two brackets, but in the book it’s one of the characters, Holloway, but stylized that way,” she explained.
Internicola says the band usually approaches their songwriting musically first, and she brought the idea to the band to write a song that mirrored House of Leaves, because some of her favourite 2000s bands had done the same.
“I found that [those songs] were only about one thing and the whole point of the book is that its about several different perspectives, kind of meeting and intertwining to create a more intricate picture.”
“As a joke I said let’s do a triple narrative, but I couldn’t get a triple narrative to work, it was too confusing.”
She says the opening line, “It gets deeper! ¼” by ¼”,” is a reference to how in the novel, every time someone looks at the house, it grows slightly, by one quarter inch.
“It’s just miniscule by miniscule, but in a more subtextual way, it is about not being able to trust what you see in terms of anxieties and flaws—pushing people away,” said Internicola.
“I think a lot of this song is about just not trying to spiral and continuing to traumatize yourself.”
Then, she says the second part of the song is pretty well word-for-word quoting a passage of the book, with minor alterations to help it fit the rhythm of the song.
She says the line, “Why did God leave us here? So he might say ‘Be not me, I am alone’,” is more about grief, and having lost someone.
Instrumentally, Internicola says that this song was the fourth song the band wrote together and while writing this one, Coup D’état had really found their groove musically.
“The grooves are a lot more complex, the rhythms are a lot more complex, I’m playing around with delay and reverb, and I think I can say for all of us, we’re really proud of this song.”
Preview “[]” from Coup D’état’s debut album What Happens After The Epilogue…? below:
To listen to What Happens After The Epilogue…? in its entirety, stream it online via Bandcamp or Spotify.
With this record having been released last December, but still charting on CFUV and getting play on other college radio stations in Canada, Coup D’état is pushing forward, writing new material and has a couple more releases coming soon.
They have a split coming out at the end of April with Lakeside Amusement Park out of Kelowna and they will be putting out an EP sometime in the autumn.
Coup D’état will be playing two shows in Vancouver over the next month, one being at GreyLab on April 26th, and the other being at Red Gate with Vancouver-based Emma Goldman for their release show on May 9th.
In Victoria, Coup D’état has a show booked for Oaklands Community Centre on May 31st.
Follow them on Instagram to keep up with new releases and upcoming shows.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Sweet Delirium blends jazz, shoegaze and R&B on debut album
- New Music Monday: Diploids collaborate to create their brand of experimental jazz
- New Music Monday: Niloo releases first single from upcoming album
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“I know I can speak for all of us when I say Troy [Lemberg] and Koby [Andrews] from CFUV have been with us since day one,” said Internicola.
“We got our promo recorded from the CFUV Live sessions and without that promo, we wouldn’t have gotten our first label on Yetzer Hara Records.”
She added that they will be eternally grateful for the airplay they get from CFUV and for having this platform for bands like Coup D’état to be heard on.
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Coup D’état in the comments below.
