Press shot by Padrian McLeod
Toronto’s Kiwi Jr. have released the title-track off their forthcoming album Football Money. The single highlights the bands penchant for crafting infectious indie-rock/garage pop that will stick in your brain on repeat.
Listen to title track “Football Money”
Of the song, Kiwi Jr. have said, “We came up with the concept for this song while in an Uber XL loaded up with all of our gear on the way to a gig at the Silver Dollar (r.i.p.) in Toronto – the driver was going on about how much soccer player Paul Pogba was being paid and we started thinking about the weight of “football money” as controlled, or scaled currency by which to measure things. Musically we came up with something like Superchunk meets the Clean, but I distinctly remember trying to sound early Misfits in the early demo stages.”
Today’s single is the follow up to “Salary Man” which CLASH labeled “a gloriously raggedy piece of indie pop that recalls early R.E.M. and Pavement singles in its Rickenbacker sweep.”
Football Money will have its world-wide release on January 17th via Persona Non Grata Records (home to Pip Blom). The album had a Canadian release this past March on Mint Records. The album was engineered by Aaron Goldstein, and mixed by Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh.
The band have been confirmed to play SXSW in Austin, Texas in March 2020. Before that, they’ll head over to the UK for shows in Glasgow, Manchester, and at London’s Waiting Room on January 29th 2020.
All natives of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Kiwi Jr. are now based in Toronto and much of their songwriting is informed by the city that surrounds them. They have spent the last 5 years honing their craft both in the studio and live, including opening spots with Wolf Parade, New Pornographers and Alvvays.
Football Money was recreated at high volume on stages across Canada; a dispatch stitched out of fragments, a lustrous twelve-string paint-job unraveling ten booksmart tracks in under thirty minutes. A product of two years of labor, a monument to work-life balance, the record is not unattractively scarred by its circumstance: recorded by nightfall in dormant studios, friends and enemies drafted as backup singers and engineers, the LP untidily fuses the yin of work with the yang of life, chronicling a dual-existence, unkempt instrumentalists moonlighting as undercompensated administrators by the harsh fluorescent light of day, borne back ceaselessly into the Greater Toronto Area by night.
Kiwi Jr,: Rickenbackers detuned to the frequency of a blue-screen migraine, equal parts jangle and punk – a modern day Modern Lovers with the Kinks cc’d.
Find Kiwi Jr. here:
Website / Facebook / Twitter / Instagram / Songkick
UK tour dates:
27/1 – Glasgow, Hug & Pint
28/1 – Manchester, Gulliver’s
29/1 – London, Waiting Room
