Stars: From Capelton Hill LP

Montreal's Stars deliver their first new album in five years entitled From Capelton Hill! Stars' ninth album and follow-up to 2017's acclaimed There Is No Love In Fluorescent Light, was composed between Seligman and Cranley over the first half of 2020. After a first attempt to assemble the record remotely with mixed results, the band convened in Montreal to record with Marcus Paquin and Jace Lasek (The Besnard Lakes) at Studio MixArts, Lasek's Breakglass Studio, and the band's own space, Zoomer. McGee says once they finally gathered in a room together, everything clicked – first as friends, then as a working band. From Capelton Hill is ultimately about a group of people who have spent more than 20 years together, and who have now started to face the awful, necessary calculus each human eventually must do: when will all of this end? The album's two lead singles showcase the band of Torquil Campbell, Evan Cranley, Amy Millan, Chris McCarron, Patty McGee, and Chris Seligman, at their very best. Triumphant and romantic, "Pretenders" embraces a Thelma and Louise-level commitment to seeing things through, and was written by Millan as a "love letter" to Campbell and her memories of the band's origins. "Snowy Owl," the album's tender, acoustic closer, finds Millan and Campbell swapping verses and once again taking the role of two characters that try to stay together but instead keep destroying one another. Campbell says the track is the epilogue to their stories: "I don't know what comes after," he says. "I just make records about other people and in the end, they turn out to be about me."