Kestrels - Better Wonder

“Halifax, NS band Kestrels have been flying the shoegaze flag since the mid-’00s when the hazy indie rock genre was not exactly in fashion and are still flying it today when it most certainly is. Their brand of shoegaze is indebted to the OG early-’90s heyday when My Bloody Valentine, Catherine Wheel & Swervedriver were destroying eardrums, and they’ve got all the moves, the tone, the pedals, the layering, the loud-quiet-loud, the ethereal harmonies, avalanche drumming, etc etc etc down to a science. Better Wonder is Kestrels’ fifth album and while I might argue that the songs that drift beyond the formula, like the almost power pop “Free Forever,” are the most successful, there’s no denying that when they stomp on the distortion, shockwaves go straight to the pleasure centers.” – BrooklynVegan

When you think of the kind of musician who quotes Jame Joyce’s Ulysses on the regular, you’re probably picturing some kind of nerd-rock impresario in a pork pie hat and glasses going hard on a squeezebox. Chad Peck is none of those things — although he probably wouldn’t knock you if you threw out the word “nerd.”

A high school English teacher from the wilds of Canada with equal love in his heart for Stephen Dedalus, the Beach Boys, and oceans of fuzz, the frontman of shoegaze rock outfit Kestrels is primed to drop his most ambitious record yet, Better Wonder, on Darla Records on 14 February 2025. It’s a nighttime delirium of an album that wrestles with love, loss, and the culmination of a life in pursuit — of what, Peck’s still not sure.

Kestrels is an ever-changing project first formed in 2008 that has seen Peck playing with a wide cast of characters — J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. included — and opening for the likes of Bob Mould. The lineup this time around features bassist Jim MacAlpine (Weird Nightmare) and drummer Michael Catano (North of America), who also played on Dream. John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Alvvays, Kurt Vile, Cyndi Lauper) and mastering engineer Greg Calbi (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Television, Blondie) also lent a hand.

A combination of tracks from a decade-old scrapped solo release and songs written while in isolation in 2021, Better Wonder is “a nighttime record riddled with anxiety written during a weird time,” Peck says. “I had lived alone in the woods most of my adult life and I loved that lifestyle in a lot of ways. But during that time period there was so much change and tumult and those feelings of insanity at three in the morning. I was trying to capture it in a murky, uncomfortable sound.”

The result is a woozy, disorienting suite of tracks, like finding a secret station between channels on a late-night drive. Give in to the gloom.