Heartland Canadian indie rockers The Sarandons return with their second full length album, Drawing Dead, a largely live-off-the-floor record that sees the band moving from “holding on tightly, to letting go lightly,” as lead singer Dave Suchon puts it. There are still plenty of electrifying moments – from Craig Keeney’s signature guitar solos to Damian Coleman’s fiercely melodic bass lines – but the true power is grounded in the band’s ability to cope with life’s wreckage.

Though Drawing Dead prides itself on its ability to take a header into the perils of middle adulthood, The Sarandons double down on their herculean stamp of defiant optimism where the lines of fiction become strongly rooted in reality. Much like looking through a View-Master, filled with snapshots of the past, Drawing Dead is an exploration of these ephemeral fragments – pieces of a life once held together but now broken into memories. Or as the poet William Blake once put it, “Mind-forg’d manacles.” Yet, in this reckoning, there’s a certain power: the chance to process, to let go, and to find a new way forward.

“Drawing Dead,” the focus track and the album’s namesake, is a play on going up against futility and finding peace and purpose in the inevitable. It’s about embracing defeat – or, more accurately, dealing with the cards you’re given – with a stoic resolve and an understanding of the graduations of acceptance toward total loss. That said, its glossy synths and bright guitar leads tantamount to Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner suggest a rebirth of sorts.

On this record, we worked with a new producer, Will Crann. We’d worked with Will on previous records and gotten to know him as a mix engineer. Before we started recording we talked about capturing more live off the floor and so that’s how we proceeded. We also worked to simplify arrangements and really only present one or two melodic elements at a time. Finally, we tried to leave room in the arrangements and mixed – the sorta space that lets things feel big.