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.
To date, there have been 78 New Music Monday features published through this collaboration.
This week, grey divorce is the New Music Monday highlight!
grey divorce started out as the solo project of Marco Bernardez-Lai, allowing him to expand his horizons as a musician, producer and songwriter.
Bernardez-Lai has played in several projects and bands. Most recently, he was in Victoria-based Teenage Art Scene, but sought another way of making the many songs he had written come to fruition.
“grey divorce kind of emerged as a home recording project that I’d been concocting for quite a while,” Bernardez-Lai told Victoria Buzz.
“I have quite a huge backlog of songs that ended up being like diary entries—trying to grow into my sound by trying to emulate the sound of artists that I admire.”
He says that he never really thought about releasing his home recordings, but then began hanging out with other Victoria bedroom-recording artists who were releasing their music, so he decided to give it a go.
grey divorce recently released a new full-length album of Americana/country-gaze tunes called my luck has changed.
Bernardez-Lai says he was inspired for this album by paying attention to what other musicians in Victoria are doing, finding himself singing and playing in similar styles to others in the scene.
He also noted that he was inspired to write this album by artists like Sparkle Horse, and the way he finds it easier to write about animals and nature than he does human experiences.
“I like the way that [animals] move in tandem with humanity, but also apart from it—there’s such a great thing, knowing that there’s beings out there that know of us, but we aren’t the centre, you know,” he said.
“How does a cow see us, right? The cow is probably more occupied with the grass it’s eating than the farmer.”
He wrote these songs between summer 2024 and summer 2025, when he moved to Edinburgh, Scotland.
According to Bernardez-Lai, he held off on the album’s release for so long because he was fighting the urge to keep tinkering away at the songs, rather than letting them be.
“I exported all the files, was going to work on them when I was in Edinburgh, but I did not touch them until I released them,” he said.
“I was so certain I was going to fix everything, and I just had to wait enough so I could be okay with the fact that some stuff was like, kinda bad—perfect is the enemy of good, right?”
Once Bernardez-Lai came to the decision to release the album as-is, he came up with the album name and had an album cover made before quietly releasing the record online.
With my luck has changed, grey divorce landed on the CFUV top 30 charts for three consecutive weeks.
Highlight Track – “in pasture”
grey divorce chose to highlight the song “in pasture” from my luck has changed, as the highlight track for this New Music Monday.
Bernardez-Lai says that this song is the defining song of the album for him.
“It’s the one that I think reflects my ethos of the album the best,” he explained.
“This song is sort of about reckoning with a feeling of danger and risk in life, knowing that some things are just bound to happen.”
He noted that for himself, he has found power in being content with what is happening in life—the good, the bad and everything in between.
One main line of the song reads, “happy in pastures green, troubles are waiting on me” and Bernardez-Lai likes this because it reflects the perspective of various types of farm animals on a farm.
“You’re always in danger of something bad happening, or something disturbing; however, you have to reckon with that in order to do anything.”
“Chew the cud,” he laughed.
Bernardez-Lai also noted that there is a noticeable musical change partway through the song when he uses a sample of a man being chased by a bleating goat at the Beacon Hill petting zoo.
Check out “in pasture” by grey divorce below:
To listen to “in pasture” and the rest of my luck has changed, check out grey divorce on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music.
Bernardez-Lai says he hopes to be back in Victoria this summer for some shows before he moves from Edinburgh to Amsterdam.
As for what’s next for grey divorce, Bernardez-Lai says that what started as a solo project has expanded to a duo since his Victoria-based collaborator Will Jagger joined.
He noted that whatever they make next will feature more of Jagger’s songs, as Bernardez-Lai is feeling a bit creatively tapped out.
To stay in the loop with future shows and releases, follow grey divorce on Instagram.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Fuzzpeddler explore psychedelia and sci-fi on two heavy metal bangers
- New Music Monday: Neighbourly release first full-length album since 2023
- New Music Monday: Dead Summer release first single from forthcoming EP
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 ran a show with CFUV for two-and-a-half years and was part of their Funding Drive committee, so I’ve been very involved with everyone at the station,” said Bernardez-Lai.
“There’s truly no better place or people to introduce the masses of Victoria to the masses of Victoria that make music and want to interact with the local arts scene.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of grey divorce in the comments below!
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