Montreal-based trio Bye Parula have released their new album, Something Out Of Nothing.
The band’s debut with their new label, Secret City Records, Something Out Of Nothing, sees Bye Parula at a stage in their careers where the members are no longer strangers who happened to form a band together, and increasingly find themselves on the same musical wavelength as friends.
Made up of singer and bassist Loïc Calatayud-Sola, guitarist Sebastián Riquelme, and drummer Sergio D’Isanto, Bye Parula is a truly international band, with its members hailing from Southern France, Chile, and Italy. That diverse blend of backgrounds is reflected throughout Something Out of Nothing, a record that seamlessly pulls from a wide range of genres. Rather than feeling scattered, the album's eclecticism works to its advantage, creating a sound that is both dynamic and cohesive.
Produced by Robbie Kuster (Patrick Watson) and engineered by Warren Spicer (Plants and Animals), the album is a highly collaborative effort – featuring on Something Out Of Nothing, is Inuk singer-songwriter Elisapie, Bibi Club’s Adèle Trottier-Rivard, Morgan Moore, and Karkwa keyboardist François Lafontaine.
As such, Something Out Of Nothing features a dense mix of ideas and styles, even if one thing is consistent throughout the album: the groove.
While Bye Parula are best known for their 2023 single “Still Got The Spirit” – which plays every morning at 10 AM in Canada when the CBC Radio One show, “Q with Tom Power” airs – the band's moved away slightly from the more straightforward pop roots to put together something a bit weirder, even while the gorgeous falsetto vocals haven’t gone anywhere. Something Out Of Nothing is deeply cinematic, in the very literal sense that each track feels like it should be the score for some sort of combination romance/heist/coming-of-age movie.
The album is true contemporary art-pop, not afraid to be sophisticated but also not so overly serious that it can’t be fun and catchy, and this is particularly true on the title track “Something Out Of Nothing,” which also feels like the album’s most obvious contender for a big radio hit. It’s altogether more polished than their previous collection of singles or their first album, I.
“The first record was made during COVID – we had masks on. It was a really time,” says Loïc Calatayud-Sola. “Whereas for this one, we spent every Friday night at Warren’s – he would invite us over, we would cook together, everything felt way more natural. We were more confident, too, because we had the approval from people we respected a lot.”
Starting off intensely groovy with the thematically linked opening singles “I don’t know” and “KISSBURN,” the groove doesn’t let up again until halfway through the album on the single “Home,” which sees the band start to loop melodies and drumbeats and lose the falsetto to create something almost Foals-esque with its echoing vocals and intense emotion.
This slower, softer theme extends into the tracks “Orange Blossom,” the Spanish and Inuktitut-language “Miedo de olvidar,” and the French-language “Quand vient le soir.”
To close the album is the album’s hymn-like acoustic track, “Needed,” which features very few lyrics in a hypnotic loop, and one during which all three members of the trio admit to having cried during the vocal recording.
The very final track of the album is “Burning down the house,” which, while title-wise is a nod to Talking Heads, shares little musically with it, and instead is a folky tribute from Calatyud to his great-grandmother and the perseverance that saw her live to 101, and which was the “hardest song for him to write.”
Something Out of Nothing is an emotional journey through a range of musical styles, yet it never feels disjointed or out of place. Instead, it feels like three musicians working in complete sync, with a deep, intuitive understanding of one another. The result is something genuinely beautiful. Contrary to its title, Something Out of Nothing is an album shaped by real depth; built from experience, collaboration, and shared musical language.
