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Music

Premiere: Celebrate Yourself with "Lemonlime" by Smokes

The Montreal band makes a song that will make you want to toast yourself.

"Lemonlime" by Montreal's Smokes is the kind of song that makes you want to drop everything, run to a bar, order a beer, and toast to yourself. It's the kind of song that makes you want to shout "fuck yeah, me!" at the top of your lungs. The loud, stomping, three-minute rock tune with lyrics inspired by lead singer Nick Maas's coming out as gay after growing up in a conservative corner of the U.S., celebrates all the things that make people different and great at the same time. While such a theme could have made the song super self-reflective and personal, instead it looks outward, and sounds more like some kind of national anthem of humanity that everyone can shout along to.

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Smokes get their rock chops from deep inside the Montreal music scene, with various members coming from other heavy hitting acts in the city over the past decade. Maas met violinist Patrick Cruvellier when they played in the orchestral-prog band Bananafish, and the two started Smokes when that band called it quits. Soon they moved into the legendary DIY warehouse venue The Torn Curtain, where they met their drummer, Jeremy MacCuish, who played with local icons Parlovr at the time. They played as a trio for a couple years before adding bassist Andrew Miller from twee-noise band Boy Friends (formerly The This Many Boyfriends Club). It's no coincidence, then, that Smokes plays with an insane but awe-inspiring mixture of Wolf Parade-y pop chaos, Built to Spill-y guitar wizardry, punky grit, orchestral grandeur, and glam attitude.

"Lemonlime" comes from their forthcoming debut LP, Zone Eater, which is due out October 30th via local arts collective Oh Hi. The band began working on it a little over a year ago at Studio La Traque, where they recorded drum tracks in a cavernous room with 30-foot-high ceilings, laying a massive foundation to build everything else on.

But the inspiration for "Lemonlime" came long before then. "I came out about 5 years ago, right around the time Pat and I began Smokes, and this song is about that transformation," says Maas. "Life is too damn short to isolate yourself, whatever the reason. I had hidden from the world for so long that I didn't even know I was hiding. I just existed. 'Lemonlime' is about being who you already are, with no shame, with no fear. I still have a long way to go—my whole life, in fact. Coming out is not a singular event. It is a continuous thread. We must come out every time we look in a mirror. Every time we go up on stage and scream to the fucking world. It never stops, nor should it. This song says, 'Don't fuck with me, I know who I am.' But also, it's a fun song, because being different is fucking awesome."

Greg Bouchard is a writer living in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter.