Junior

Sometimes, a deadline helps. “It was always looking forward, looking forward, never looking back—we were never listening to previous sessions,” Corridor bassist/vocalist Dominic Berthiaume tells Apple Music of the recording process for *Junior*, his band’s third album and first for Sub Pop. “We recorded every idea that we had, cut those that we thought weren’t good enough. It was really, really intense.” In an effort to deliver *Junior* to their new label quickly enough to secure a 2019 release date, the Montreal outfit—Berthiaume, guitarist Julian Perrault, vocalist/guitarist Jonathan Robert, drummer Julien Bakvis—allowed themselves just a fraction of the time they’d usually taken to sculpt a full-length. The result is their most focused to date and one of the best rock records of the year, the sound of a band (and Sub Pop’s first francophone signing) experiencing a breakthrough. “You start a band and you don\'t know what you\'re doing and you don’t know what you want,” Berthiaume says. “But the more you go, the more you do know. As an artist, the key is to keep evolving. That’s one of the most difficult things about growing up: You just want to still be who you were, but not.” This is the story of *Junior*, one track at a time. **Topographe** “This is a song about people observing other people from above. Jonathan is making an analogy here with someone who draws mountain maps on a 2D platform, you know? We had just bought this synthesizer, and I didn\'t know what to do on my bass guitar, so I just took the synthesizer and played some basslines with it. It took a while to compose this one as a group because all of us didn\'t know what to do on that guitar riff, but in the end, Julien came with this firecracking, explosive bass drum sequence.” **Junior** “We had a show in Quebec City, three hours from Montreal, and we borrowed Julian’s parents’ car. So we did the show, and the next morning, Julian woke us up and was like, ‘Hey, guys, have you seen my pants?’ His pants were stolen during the night, and he found them maybe half an hour later, down the stairs of where we were sleeping. The car keys were in his pocket, but the pockets were empty. So we had to call his parents the day after to tell them, ‘The car keys were stolen, so you\'ve got to come to Quebec City to give us another pair of keys so we can bring back the car to Montreal.’ It was a painful experience: You\'re 30 years old and you\'ve still got to call your parents to come pick you up after your show, because you\'ve been robbed. That\'s the story of the second verse.” **Domino** “We have this thing when we get the rehearsing space: It\'s just everybody plugs into their guitar and bass and drums, and most of the time someone will start to play something and all of the others will join. We started to play this riff for maybe 10 minutes, and after we played it, we were like, ‘Oh, shit, this is a really, really cool riff. We should do something with it.’ So we recorded it on my iPhone, to save it for later. It was months later that we actually came up with all of the other things that surround it, during another session when we were wondering what we should do next. Someone just thought, ‘Hey, you remember that jam that we played months ago that you recorded? It could fit really well on this one.’” **Goldie** “It\'s weird: ‘Goldie’ is mainly about someone who gets pleasure through violence, satisfaction through violence. Goldie is that character. This song took so much time to actually finish. We had the main riff of the song, something we were all confident with when we wrote it. We actually had such a hard time to find any other fitting riffs that would actually work with the song. At some point, Julien had just bought a new sampling pad and he had banks of silly sounds on it. The bridge came from that box. He just started to play something that is not actually on the recording. That\'s how we nailed it.” **Agent double** “This is the oldest song from the album. We wrote this song not long after we released our second album, *Supermercado*. It’s mostly about people isolating themselves. Someone like a good friend, he meets a new girl or a new guy, and then he just starts to isolate himself with this particular person and not calling his friends or his family anymore. Jonathan didn\'t want it on the record because he thought it would sound different, a more subtle song, but it is actually not. So we had an argument. But it made it. I\'m pretty happy about that.” **Microscopie** “A really fun song to create. It\'s pretty short and direct. We added so much other silly stuff, like vocal samples with the pitch shifted and other textures, like bubbles. Everyone in the studio played bongos on this track. We were maybe eight people in the studio, and everyone had his try on the bongos.” **Grand cheval** “We were just sitting in a park, having a beer, having a good time, and this guy shows up and just tries to tell us how we should act and how we should be, trying to act like a philosopher. There\'s a French expression that we say: ‘*Monter sur ses grands chevaux*,’ which means to climb on your big horse, on your tall horse, your *grand cheval*. That means you are, how do you say? Not nerdy, not angry, but frustrated, when you want to explain your philosophy and you see that people are not listening to you. Frustrated. In the end, we just wanted him to go. I think it\'s our mellowest song, maybe our second ballad ever. It still sounds like us, but in a more calm way.” **Milan** “‘Milan’ is about someone who is dead inside, someone who is really jealous and bitter about other people, someone who focuses more on the negative way of seeing things than the positive. We just thought, let\'s have fun in the studio. We\'ve put another sample of a car crash, of a bottle, glass bottles falling on the ground. It just sounds way darker than any other songs on the record.” **Pow** “It\'s funny. It was a song about getting out of our comfort zones, just trying something new, something else. In the end, I think this is what it sounds like, a Corridor song, but a little bit more out here. Less of a jangly guitar thing. All of the songs we record live, it\'s just we play the song as a band, and then we add some extra stuff that we couldn\'t play as a four-piece. Jonathan had these weird ideas of putting an arpeggio of his own voice through a computer sample. There was supposed to be maybe 10 samples of racing cars, but in the end, there are maybe four.” **Bang** “‘Bang’ is a song about Jonathan himself just thinking about what is happening right now to him. He\'s writing a record with his band, stuff is going pretty well, we\'re going to be signed on Sub Pop, good things are happening. But in the end he feels very tired and frustrated about this whole process. So it\'s really self-reflective, and at the end, the very last sentence, we\'re just shouting something in French, which is translated to \'the burden of the worst assholes,\' and it\'s just referring to him as being an asshole in this whole process, and, mostly, at the very end of this process.”

Corridor are a group from Montreal and their Sub Pop debut, Junior, was made just yesterday. The rock'n'roll band had barely inked their record deal when they surfed into studio, racing against time to make the most dazzling, immediate and inventive album of their young career: 39 minutes of darting and dodging guitars, spiraling vocal harmonies, and the complicated, goldenrod nostalgia of a Sunday mid-afternoon. This ain't Corridor's first rodeo. Junior is the band's third full-length and their third recorded with their friend, producer (and occasionally roommate) Emmanuel Ethier. However 2015's Le Voyage Éternel and 2017's Supermercado were made languorously, their songs taking shape across whole seasons. This time Dominic Berthiaume (vocals/bass), Julian Perreault (guitar), Jonathan Robert (vocals/guitar/synths), and Julien Bakvis (drums) permitted themselves no such indulgence. The band were committed to releasing an album every two years, and for Junior it required a blitz. "If you want to release something this fall, we need the masters by the 10th of May," the label had warned them. Winter was already in its last throes: on March 1, Corridor went into studio; in mid-April, Corridor came out. They had somehow created Junior and it was, if we may be so bold, spectacular. Singers, two guitars, bass, drums: the timelessness of the setup underpins the timelessness of the sound, a rock'n'roll borrowing from each of the past six decades—punk and pop, psych and jangle, daydream and swoon. This is music that's muscular, exciting and full of love, its riffs a kind of medicine. Whereas Corridor's past work could sometimes seem overstuffed, twenty ideas to the same song, the new work is hypnotic, distilled. "Part of the beauty of the thing is that we didn't have time to think about it," says Berthiaume. Six of Junior's 10 tracks were conceived during a single weekend. The words to "Bang" were written on the eve of the sessions, as Robert began to panic: "Je payerai tôt ou tard," he sings: I'll pay, sooner or later. Fewer jams, fewer overdubs—no fortnight in the countryside, secluding themselves in a chalet. Even the artwork came in the nick of time: in spite of other, meticulous, masterpieces, Robert's "shitty last-minute collage" (of an egg saying hello) was the one his bandmates went for. That might be Corridor's best trick—their mixture of seriousness and whimsy. Songs like "Miscroscopie" and the standout "Domino" are purposeful, full of songcraft, even as they let loose, slip their collar. "Topographe"'s all call and answer, like rival Cupids shooting arrows at each other across a ravine. "Pow" and "Goldie" are like hurtling racecars, or teams of horses, accelerating towards a memory. And Junior's title track—by turns twitchy and anthemic—is in fact a tribute to Perreault, their "joueur étoile," star player: in spite of his disappointed parents ("parents déçus"), he's Corridor's VIP. Junior's ten tracks are filled with tributes like this, impressionistic portraits of characters in the band-members' lives. Their tone is affectionate, the meaning hazy—even if you speak French. Sub Pop have never before, in their 33-year history, signed a Francophone act. Maybe the band's magic springs from their ingenious hooks, their topaz-tinted vision. Maybe it's the panache of Québec's insurgent underground scene, or the camaraderie of Robert and Berthiaume, who have played together since they were 14. Maybe it's their name—a hallway crossed with a toreador. Probably it's all of these, and none of them: Junior is a joy, a hasty miracle, because it's so much damn fun to listen to. This album is 39 minutes; each day has 24 hours; you can listen 36 times before tomorrow.

After two albums of spiky, echoing post-punk revivalism of the finest kind, recorded at a slow pace over long stretches, the Montreal band Corridor had to change their way of working on their third album, Junior.

'Junior' by Corridor, album review by Adam Fink. The full-length and debut for Sub Pop/Bosound Records, comes out October 18th