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 76 New Music Monday features published through this collaboration.
This week, Neighbourly is the New Music Monday highlight!
Neighbourly is a four-piece psych-fusion band from right here in Victoria who have established themselves as heavy-hitters in the music scene over the last four years, and prior to that played together in a different project called Speak Easy.
The band is comprised of Ollie Sandberg, Latham Reader, Lauren Giorgio and Scott Sparrow, who approach songwriting in a very collaborative—or neighbourly—way, with all members of the band aiding in the writing, production and fleshing out of each song.
Since the last time Victoria Buzz spoke with the band, they have released three EPs, but haven’t put out a full length album since 2023—until now.
On March 6th, they released Kerplunk to the world—an eight-track album where each member contributed two songs.
For this album, the band hired Dave Perry to record them at Risque Disque Records near Ladysmith. This was a big step for the band, who are usually keen to produce their own material.
Perry specializes in recording analog to tape, a process that is a bit more involved than recording digitally and something that Neighbourly really wanted to embrace.
“He’s just someone in Victoria who is like, ‘the tape guy,’ if you want to record to tape on Vancouver Island, Dave would probably be in the top three,” said Sandberg.
“Working with tape rather than digital—what I took away from this experience—is that you are kind of capturing a performance.”
Sandberg told Victoria Buzz this release has felt a bit peculiar to the band because since 2024, the band’s dynamic has changed a bit.
One of those changes was that Sparrow moved away to Vancouver and wanted to travel. Another was that the band’s record label Earth Libraries wanted to hold off on releasing the record to better fit their schedule.
Though these changes influenced the way Neighbourly operates, the band embraced them and figured out how to keep going leading up to this latest release.
“I think that’s just where we’re at with Neighbourly,” Sandberg explained.
“We’re navigating someone not living in the same town as us anymore so we have to be way more intentional when it comes to shows and booking shows.”
He added that because of these obstacles and the fact that touring the album’s release was difficult to navigate, releasing Kerplunk to the world felt like a laid back experience.
Despite the “chiller” release, Sandberg said that this summer will be the band’s busiest yet.
“We have music out, people know we’re active, it’s nice,” he explained.
“It feels like we got it to a place where we’ve always wanted it to be—it’s funding itself, whether that’s financially or spiritually.”
Highlight Track – “Hailu”
With each member writing and contributing two songs to the album, Sandberg said that his contributions were “The Way” and “Hailu.”
“Hailu” was particularly important to him because he wrote it as an ode to one of his favorite musicians, Hailu Mergia—an influential Ethiopian keyboardist and accordion player.
“Arguably maybe my favourite artist ever—his story is just so sick,” explained Sandberg.
“He was coming up in the 70s in Ethiopia but in that era there was civil war. He actually left and moved to New York where he was a taxi driver for like 30 years.”
Eventually, a record label called Awesome Tapes from Africa stumbled across his music from when he was making music back in Ethiopia and they reissued all his tapes.
“They discovered that he was still alive in New York City and now he is touring again,” he exclaimed, comparing Mergia’s story to Searching for Sugar Man documentary following the rediscovery of Sixto Rodriguez.
“It’s a very similar story, and honestly, I’m just waiting for the documentary about Hailu Mergia because he’s incredible.”
Sandberg describes Mergia’s music as lo-fi recordings indicative of a party band and says that he’s always wanted to write a song that sounds like it could come from a Hailu Mergia record. That was his inspiration for “Hailu.”
Check out “Hailu” by Neighbourly below:
To listen to “Hailu” and the rest of Kerplunk, check Neighbourly out on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music.
Though this summer is shaping up to be Neighbourly’s busiest summer to date, the band is still working out the finer details of many of those shows.
They do have one announced right here in Victoria on Thursday, July 2nd at Lucky Bar alongside Cistern and Smoke Eaters.
Following that show, there is much more Neighbourly to come for Victoria and the rest of BC.
To stay in the loop with future shows and releases, follow Neighbourly on Instagram.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Dead Summer release first single from forthcoming EP
- New Music Monday: The Projectors release music video for single off new album
- New Music Monday: Conjure Hand explores funk-rock direction on two new singles
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.
“They are staples to the scene—CFUV needs to keep running, that’s for damn sure,” said Sandberg.
“CFUV is the best thing ever for the Victoria music scene since you could plug your guitar into an amp,” he laughed.
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Neighbourly in the comments below!
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