Behind The Album: Arcane Ghosts' Distant Youth

Keavin Wiggins | 03-31-2023

EP cover art

Toronto-based alt-rockers Arcane Ghosts released their new EP, "Distant Youth" today (March 31st). To celebrate we asked them to tell us about the effort. Here they are with the story:

The collection of songs found in "Distant Youth" marked a turning point for Arcane Ghosts in terms of songwriting, public reception, and overall potential to be a name to remember within the alternative scene.

Following the release of our prior EP "Human Interference" in 2019, we set out to play as many shows as possible while continuing to improve our craft. We all know what happened at the start of 2020... and as a result shows were effectively ended due to lockdowns in our home of Toronto, Canada. Not only did we lose the opportunity to perform for people, we also had no way of practicing as a full band since we rented public studio spaces by the hour! This forced us to write songs exclusively by sitting in a room together, picking out the best guitar parts and vocal hooks and having everything else come together in the studio on a later date. Our producer and engineer Anton DeLost was able to bring out the "pop" and "indie" side of Arcane Ghosts while maintaining some of the heavy elements found in our past work. Overall, this new direction stemmed our strongest and most marketable music to date, and set the blueprint that we will follow for the foreseeable future. To put it best, the music on our new EP is "poppy, but technical".

We started releasing some songs from "Distant Youth" in 2021, with the first one of those being Butterfly back in March of that year. It was amazing to see how well-received it was in its first couple weeks! We got some radio play on 102.1 the Edge and had an exclusive interview with CBC Kingston, not to mention that we had a lot of positive feedback from peers, family and friends. Releases for "In the Blue" and "Rollercoaster" soon followed, with each one being bigger and more successful than the last. All kinds of increases in growth started to happen regarding streams, followers and overall respect from people both in and out of the scene.

The lyrics touch upon various themes of growing up and seeing different perspectives, overthinking relationships and summer nostalgia that all culminate into the title of the EP being "Distant Youth". Lyrics for this album came together from trying new themes we have never touched upon in the past, and themes that we have touched on before but with more imagery defining lyrics. Most of the lyrics completed in this EP leaves a lot of imagery for the listener, and allows the listener to picture the imagery as they are listening to the song. Jason would write most of the lyrics and then would take his rough drafts over to the band to refine. We wanted to ensure each band member had input in the lyrics, and contributed to why we feel this is our strongest EP to date.

All in all, the listener will be taken through all kinds of unique vibes in the five songs "Rollercoaster", "In the Blue", "Paralyzed", "Butterfly", and "Fever Dreams". We hope everyone enjoys listening to these songs that we put together, and hope to see more fans come out to the shows to interact with us on and off the stage. We also hope they can hear our lyrics, and relate them to their everyday lives however they can.

Now that you know the story behind the EP, listen to it on Spotify and learn more about the band here.