AloneKitty - wide awake
Toronto’s AloneKitty returns with wide awake, the band’s third album and a melodic wall of distorted guitars, dissonance, and alternate tunings that pulls from Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and the experimental edges of alternative rock. Following two albums that both charted on the NACC 200, songwriter and guitarist Michelle K turns personal loss into tenacity, tension, and towering noise.
During the making of wide awake, Michelle lost both of her parents. “As adults we still, in some quiet way, think of our parents as the people behind us if everything falls apart. Suddenly that backstop was gone.” Grief runs beneath the album, but never as a slogan. Instead, melancholy melodies and serrated guitars collide, hooks emerge from the haze, and songs feel less like answers than a way forward.
A chance encounter with Thurston Moore’s The Best Day opened a new door. Michelle began experimenting with one of Moore’s alternate guitar tunings, eventually using it on more than half the record, including “She Thinks It’s Alright” and “I’m Wide Awake.” The result is a sound that feels both instinctive and deliberate, with the band leaning into dissonance without losing sight of the song underneath.
Self-produced with engineer Darren McGill and friend Michael Flynn, wide awake was recorded largely live at Toronto’s Union Sound with bassist Michael Small and drummer Stefan Loebus. Most tracks came together in one or two takes. “We worked quickly, trusted each other, and tried to preserve the chemistry of people playing together in a room instead of polishing every rough edge away.”
Sequenced like an old-fashioned LP, the album unfolds across two five-song sides before closing with “Disappointed (For the Last Time),” a deeply personal epilogue about Michelle’s father. Recorded solo, with Michelle playing guitar and bass and handling vocals, the song builds into a wall of sound aimed at the memory of a father who “couldn’t, or wouldn’t, accept who I was.” What begins in anger ultimately moves toward something closer to peace.
When it came time to choose the song that would introduce the album, mastering engineer Simon Scott of Slowdive didn’t hesitate on “I’m Wide Awake.” “It’s a banger,” he told her. Hard to argue with that.
Mixed by Luke Schindler and mastered by Simon Scott, wide awake finds AloneKitty embracing the messy intersection of grief, identity, and reinvention. Call it shoegaze, call it noise rock, call it melodic dissonance. Whatever the label, this is a band finding its voice by turning up the volume.
wide awake arrived November 6 via Mint 400 Records.
