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 79 New Music Monday features published through this collaboration.
This week, Treewell is the New Music Monday highlight!
Treewell is a screamo band whose members range in age between 15 and 23-years-old. Since forming and playing their first show in 2025, they have been making waves in the scene.
The five-piece screamo outfit is comprised of Max Richmond and Knovah Selinger on guitars, Garnet Hawthorne on bass, Thorn Drovin on drums and Everett Rinaldi on lead vocals.
The band started with Richmond and Selinger, who had been jamming together last summer and planning to put a band together when Rinaldi came into the picture after he moved to Victoria from California.
The idea to start an emo band came up serendipitously between the three of them, then they recruited Hawthorne and Drovint.
Treewell started jamming in September 2025 with all members of the band. Since then, they have been hard at work writing music and playing as many shows as they can.
Their first show came from CFUV music director Troy Lemberg, who had a band drop off a bill and needed Treewell to fill the slot.
“We’d been jamming for maybe a month at the jam space and we had maybe three songs,” Drovin told Victoria Buzz.
“Out of nowhere, Troy reached out to one of us and was like ‘hey, we had a band drop off this bill, do you want to fill in,’ and I think it was day-of.”
The show was at the Fernwood Community Centre, also known as ‘Big Fernwood,’ where Treewell opened for an Ontario-based band called Ivy Gardens.
“I used to grow up watching Ivy Gardens because I used to live in Ontario, and one of my first hardcore shows ever was an Ivy Gardens show,” noted Rinaldi.
“And one of my first shows ever was with this band, and it was really surreal.”
The show went well for Treewell and from there they have kept at it and have grown a considerable following in Victoria’s underground music scene.
In early 2026, they played a sold-out house show and a sold-out show in the halfpipe at Influence Board Shop.
As nearly half the band are minors, Treewell has been especially influential for screamo fans who are under 19-years-old.
“I really feel like there is a growing movement of new bands and there’s new kids who want to come to shows because like, there’s these other kids who I know that are playing shows,” said Selinger.
“Now their friends are coming to shows and it just feels really awesome.”
Rinaldi also noted that the age diversity in the band has never been an issue for them, and they see it as a strength more than anything else.
“It honestly, really reminds me of skate culture,” he explained.
“I grew up skateboarding my whole life and I would go to the skate park as a 15-year-old. I would be skating with guys who were way older than me, but having that common interest brings people together.”
In late April, Treewell released their debut EP Star Shaped Wounds into the world after recording with Cody Baresich at Circle A. Studios here in Victoria.
Highlight Track – “Antlers”
Rinaldi noted that while the track “Onestaratatime” was initially everyone’s highlight track from Star Shaped Wounds, “Antlers” was a brand new song and it became their new cornerstone.
“When we recorded this EP, we recorded a song that we hadn’t played live, ever,” he said.
“We basically wrote it, recorded the EP and when we played the release show, we played ‘Antlers’ for the first time.”
As the band’s lyricist, Rinaldi says that he loves how dynamic the song is, with tempo changes and a musical complexity that the whole band is really proud of.
“The song has a spoken word part in it that is very, very personal to myself and it was difficult to write,” Rinaldi continued.
“It’s about a relationship, another person having borderline personality disorder and the chaos that ensues from that, and I think the song captures that feeling very well.”
Richmond added that the song started with a riff he came up with and workshopped with Drovin.
This song, and much of Treewell’s music, is heavily inspired by the band You and I.
Check out “Antlers” below:
To listen to “Antlers” and the rest of Star Shaped Wounds, check out Treewell on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify and Apple Music.
Treewell has two shows coming up soon.
One is at the Native Friendship Centre on Hillside Avenue on August 27th, with Leaves like Tiny Flames from Winnipeg. This show has yet to be formally announced.
The other is a UVic event in September that is in-part being produced by CFUV. More details to come on this show as well.
Other than that, Treewell says they are primarily focused on writing new music.
To stay in the loop with future shows and releases, follow Treewell on Instagram and on Gigpit.
Related:
- New Music Monday: grey divorce quietly releases new album while living in Scotland
- 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
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.
“CFUV really cares about the music,” said Hawthorne
“They have no malicious intent behind anything that they’re doing, and everything that they do, they put their whole hearts into—they just want to help people and help young people get into music.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Treewell in the comments below!
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