The uncanny rise of Wolf Parade: A very 2005 story
In 2005, I was working at a record shop in Ohio, blessed with a 17:00 to midnight shift each Friday, during which we’d stuff the five-disc CD changer with the latest releases from all the animal-themed indie rock bands du jour.
We might go with Grizzly Bear and Minus the Bear one week, Deerhunter and Deerhoof the next; or maybe a pleasant combo of Sparklehorse and Band of Horses. It was a veritable ‘animal collective’ for much of the 2000s, come to think of it, and for a brief spell in ‘05, the whole thing was going to the wolves—not so much to Wolf Eyes, Sea Wolf, or We Are Wolves, I should say, but to a Canadian outfit called Wolf Parade.
“I remember sitting around an apartment and watching Chronicles of Riddick, and being like, ‘If we don’t leave now, we’re not gonna make it to Portland on time!’” Wolf Parade singer/keyboardist Spencer Krug recalled to Billboard in a recent retrospective on 2005 indie music.
Krug, who’d previously played in a different animal-named band called Frog Eyes, was 28 years old and living in Montreal when his new band was signed to the revered indie label Sub Pop. Better still, they were informed that they’d be recording their debut full-length studio album with production assistance from Isaac Brock, the Modest Mouse frontman who was fresh off the biggest success of his own career with the ‘Float On’ single.
The only small obstacle was that Brock and the studio were in Oregon, roughly 3,000 miles away from Krug and his collection of Vin Diesel DVDs. “So we drove to Portland from Montreal with our shitty, shitty tour van full of our old gear,” Krug said, “Sub Pop probably didn’t even know what was happening; they probably assumed we were flying like normal people.”
When Krug and his bandmates finally completed the multi-day journey and stumbled into Brock’s studio, the producer was bemused. “Isaac was like, ‘What are you guys doing here?’” Krug recalled, “and we said, ‘We’re here to record the record!’ He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, shit, that’s today!’”
Eventually, Wolf Parade got around to the music-making part of their adventure, and the resulting LP, Apologies to the Queen Mary, became one of the defining indie records of its era, earning rave reviews and numerous star points from the bloggy tastemakers of the aughts. Additionally, the album’s timing made it something of the cherry on top of a new, increasingly hyped English-speaking Montreal indie scene that already included Arcade Fire, The Stills, and Besnard Lakes, among others.
Krug certainly noticed and appreciated the wave of positive attention, but at the same time, “There was no metric to really measure anything against,” he noted, “We couldn’t, like, check our social media numbers, and Sub Pop wasn’t emailing us and telling us, ‘Congratulations, here are your sales numbers’. All you could really gauge it by was print media, and how many people were coming to your shows.”
Even though Queen Mary was their breakout, Wolf Parade’s next two albums would actually perform better on the US charts, peaking at number 45 and 48. The band never achieved household name recognition, however, even by animal band standards, and Krug now looks back on some of the weirdness of indie’s supposed aughts heyday with bewilderment, particularly the way corporate interests infiltrated the supposed “scene”.
“We’d go to festivals, and the amount of swag that was backstage in the 2000s was so weird, because it didn’t really align with the origins of these bands that came out of nothing,” Krug told Billboard. He added incredulous, “You learn later in life which of your peers came from money and which didn’t, but when you’re 20, you’re just like, ‘We’re all starving artists’. And then you’re like, ‘Yes, I will definitely take some free jeans’. Jeans are expensive!”
