When I was seventeen, I hit rock bottom. I was woken up at 2 a.m. on a January Monday and told my life as I knew it had violently ended. Hours later, I drifted through an airport as if in a fugue state before ending up in an airplane window seat against my will, tear tracks drying on my cheeks. As we took off, I pressed play on my iPod Nano with my teeth chattering, trying and failing to process just how much of myself had been murdered that morning. As luck would have it, Ariel Engle’s voice was the one to ripple through my head: “Future’s not what it used to be,” she sang. “But we still got to go there.” It was Broken Social Scene’s “Gonna Get Better,” which felt like a cruel maxim to hear at that moment. But it ended up being precisely what I needed: “Things’ll get better / ‘Cause they can’t get worse.” The logic of that seemed to hold true. So I sat there and replayed the Hug of Thunder track again and again, watching my home, my life, myself shrink into pinpricks beneath me as I flew towards a future I would have died to prevent.
Since their 1999 inception, Canadian supergroup Broken Social Scene has been that salve for more people than could possibly be counted. Their 2002 breakthrough record, You Forgot It in People, soundtracked innumerable lives and influenced just as many works of art in the years after its release, inspiring two decades of indie bands and even an anthology of short stories based on each of the album’s songs. The band’s songs move from generation to generation; just look at the resurgence of “Anthems of a Seventeen-Year Old Girl” after its inclusion in the trans epic I Saw the TV Glow.
“You want to always be there for the one who’s hurting,” frontman Kevin Drew tells me over Zoom. “That’s the point of why we do this: for community. When ‘Anthems’ went viral through the trans community from I Saw the TV Glow, that just re-awoke us into the idea of ‘Well, this is why we did this in the first place.’ It’s for the idea of safety and protection. That’s what music always meant to us. It’s identity.”
For twenty-seven years, Broken Social Scene has always stood out for their willingness to be vulnerable. Vulnerability as a one-person singer-songwriter is one thing, but vulnerability shared across seventeen-odd members of an extended band community is another, and Drew has always led by example. Take, for instance, 2002’s “I’m Still Your Fag,” a song he—an otherwise ostensibly straight man with a string of girlfriends and wives—wrote about a love affair he had with a man. “I swore I drank your piss that night to see if I could live,” he sang then. “But my wrists couldn’t stand the life that we missed.” “Vulnerability is what art is there for,” he says now, leaning forward in his seat. That’s what he’s interested in—so much so that, when we start getting into the nitty-gritty of the album’s creation in-studio, Drew cuts himself off and sighs, “Casey, I feel like I’m going down here. I want to get more into the blood.”
The “blood” here was grief. During the making of the record, Drew, producer David Newfeld, and Brendan Canning lost their mothers. Ariel Engle, her husband Andrew Whiteman, and Sam Goldberg lost their fathers. “Grief is everywhere. We’re all older now, we all have kids and have parents gone and all of that. But you discover these new educations within your grief,” Drew says. “The past is gone, and you have to live for the present. When you do look back at a time when it was easier and better, it can be easy to wish you were there, but you still have to keep going. You still have to continue.”
This emotional openness, Drew argues, is all the more important in the modern day, considering my own generation’s ever-intensifying discomfort with intimacy and preference for hiding behind screens. “What your generation was brought up on was reaction,” he declares. “Vulnerability and reaction do have a relationship together, but not the way reaction was taught to you guys. You were taught to divide. You were taught to defend. And defensiveness, that is the anti-reaction to vulnerability. So I feel for you, for your people. It’s a lonely time.”
That’s the whole point of Remember the Humans, including its title: “Charlie joked that if You Forgot It In People came out in today’s day and age and was written by AI, it would be called Remember the Human,” Drew explains. “We have still forgotten it in each other—more so now than ever. There’s a tone to the spiritual suicide beneath our feet that makes it it feel like to even speak about those feelings is to be a stereotype to your own campaign.” The role of the artist, then, is not to make art they believe will “fix” things. That is, in Drew’s mind, a heavily narcissistic perspective. “You have to get outside the mindset of thinking it matters. You actually have to accept that it doesn’t. It’s in that that you actually get into the real work of helping things change.” We live in an era of unprecedented division and callousness, and empathy feels harder to come by than ever—the awful phrase “compassion fatigue” exists for a reason. But that’s where Broken Social Scene comes in: their entire ethos is grounded in community, in simply wanting to make art with the people you love. Drew concludes: “Friendship is the greatest protest we have going right now, and yet it’s not something that’s being promoted.”
Broken Social Scene itself is less a band than it is an extended friend group. What began as a two-person instrumental project between Drew and Brendan Canning quickly became something much larger, as more and more friends and acquaintances were brought into the fold, rotating door-style. It’s long since become a meme: “just by sheer numbers, all musicians have a greater chance of being in Broken Social Scene than part of nearly anything else,” one Tweet reads. Nobody seems to know how many people are in the band at any given moment, or even how many people have been in the band overall: Wikipedia lists twenty-two, other articles say nineteen, still others say two dozen.
“I think this band is everyone’s band at the same time,” Drew shrugs. “It’s my band, it’s their band, it’s the team helping us set up press right now, it’s you giving us this space for this interview.” Drew might be the one doing the interviews, but that doesn’t mean he considers Broken Social Scene to be “his” band by any means. Really, he admits, it’s just that nobody else wants to do press. Besides, the lore is too complicated and interconnected for anyone to untangle, including Drew himself. “I feel like I let you down because I couldn’t quite remember everything,” he says, before mentally scrolling through his bandmate Rolodex, trying to figure out who I should talk to in order to get the full story. Charlie? At a seven-week silent retreat (??), so no. Feist? Probably not available. He lands on guitarist Andrew Whiteman, in part because he runs a poetry label and is currently getting his PhD, and I had referenced Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us” earlier in our conversation. So he punted me over to Whiteman, who’s mostly baffled by the hand-off when we chat a few days later. “I don’t know why Kevin’s asking me,” he scoffs. “I live in Montreal. I wasn’t even there for most of the recording.”
But funnily enough, this whole interaction seems to have been an unintentional microcosm for the way Broken Social Scene made Remember the Humans: a constant game of hot potato, songs tossed from person to person, each eager to add their part then pass the baton to someone else. At this point, no one in the band actually knows which songs they played on—something I found out when I mentioned Whiteman’s contributions to “Relief” and “Think of You” and his response was one of utter confusion. “This is part of the Broken Social Scene thing,” Whiteman tells me. “When the record’s done, we go into a room and start dissecting it and try to figure out who’s playing what. Like, ‘Are you doing that bass line, or is that me?’ Some people remember better than me. They don’t smoke as much weed as I do. But I don’t remember and have to be told what I played.”
The only constant seems to be the grounding presence of producer David Newfeld (“Newf,” as the band affectionately calls him), who produced You Forgot It in People and Broken Social Scene. “He’s the architect of the record,” Whiteman affirms. “It’s really his album.” It’s been nearly two decades since Broken Social Scene and Newf last worked together, but there was some guilt in leaving him behind to try out new styles and new producers after 2005. “He wasn’t part of the band, but he was part of the band,” Drew tells me—and, while they don’t regret those explorations, the fact that their collaboration with Newf never continued after Broken Social Scene always seemed a waste.
WITH REMEMBER THE HUMANS, Broken Social Scene is finally back in Newfeld’s orbit once more. “Honestly, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do it, because you really relinquish control when you work with someone like David,” Drew says. But his passion, his drive, his love—he still hasn’t lost his innocence towards wanting to make the greatest drum sounds, to make songs so joyous and adventurous. I was so grateful to be back in his laughter, because when he starts laughing, you can’t help but laugh too. It just feels good, Casey, to honor history with someone again.” He pauses, then grins. “And he made us an absolutely phenomenal album, too.”
He’s not wrong. As Ryan Reed put it in his review of the record last week, “Goddamn, hearing [Newfeld and BSS] back together again is magical.” You can immediately tell that this is a band that’s played together for almost thirty years, too. Drew says as much himself: “It’s a sonic memory muscle. I know their playing inside out, I know what everyone sounds like. We’ve all figured out how to play around each other: we figured out how to have sixteen people in a room sound like six, and six people sound like sixteen.” Remember the Humans is a gorgeous album through and through, at once wholly encompassing and encompassed within the spectrum of human emotion—simultaneously of, about, and for humanity itself. An ode to and a letter from.
And baked into that humanity comes strife, both in content and in process. How could it not? A band of four people, each with different tastes and opinions, is hard to keep together. Try seventeen. People change, too: Whiteman has begun worshipping at the altar of techno (“I’m tired of this fucking indie rock sludge! Give me BPMs above 120!”), while his bandmates remain rooted in their lo-fi indie roots. Apart from a few shows here and there, the members of Broken Social Scene’s have lived separate lives since Hug of Thunder nine years ago. (Rumors of a new album floated around in 2019, but when I mention that potential record to Drew now, he just laughs: “Well, we fucking threw that out the window.”) There was never a total sense of certainty that they would ever reconvene for another album. Everyone simply felt comfortable taking things as they came.
Deciding to reunite now was like reluctantly accepting an invitation to an extended family reunion (“You’re like, ‘I don’t want to hang out with my second cousins,’” Whiteman quips). It’s not because the musicians stopped loving each other, but because it’s always hard to re-enter the lives of people who only knew you as you once were. “Friendships and families are like photo albums,” Drew says. “They keep you handcuffed to who you were supposed to be, who they think you are. And you can go to your ayahuasca retreat and you can read seventeen self-help books and you can pay a therapist thousands of dollars to say that you’ve changed, but not when you’re in a band. So there was a little bit of PTSD in encountering that again.”
Even so, Whiteman pushes back on the framing of Broken Social Scene “getting back together” for Remember the Humans: “It’s not getting back together, because we never left.” He tells me the story of a very early member, Johnny Crossingham, who decided to quit after You Forgot It in People to focus on other projects. The decision baffled everyone. Drew kept telling Crossingham, “‘Dude, you don’t need to quit. Go do other things, whatever. You’re still part of the band.” (Crossingham did end up “quitting,” but also not really—last time the band played St. Catharine’s, guess who showed up to play alongside them?) Once you’ve entered through that revolving door, you’re in for life, even if you walk back out again.
But it’s not as if the recording of Remember the Humans went seamlessly. Whiteman divulges a little more than Drew, here: “It got into this, like, unholy triumvirate of Kevin, Newfeld, and Charles—the three of them fighting and battling over everything,” he laughs. Charles started out more removed from the record, living his own life instead. But at some point, Whiteman recalls, he jumped in “full hog” and the spats began. “Charlie was really the only person, I would say, that could kind of step in, elbows up, to Kevin, and say ‘No, no, send me tracks, I think this should happen this way.’ I got into a couple of battles with Charlie, too—about things like the groove, the syncopation; ‘why are you playing this long sustained chord over this thing?’”
After having Whiteman walk me through the Broken Social Scene process—at least on this record, at least in his personal experience—I can imagine how these arguments break out. “Every few months, I would drive about four or five hours to Newf’s studio, and I would just smoke pot with him for three days and record,” he recalls. Newfeld would show him an isolated piece of a song, one he might’ve never heard before, and ask him to play something on it. The problem—and the beauty, really—is that it ends up being a kind of exquisite corpse: “You add more, someone else adds more, I would come back after not listening to a certain song for four, five, six months, and I’d be like ‘What the fuck happened here? Who did this?’”
Sometimes, there’d be too many people eager to hop on a track. This was especially the case with Leslie Feist’s song, “What Happens Now.” “When she showed up, the whole entire band wanted to be on the song,” Drew laughs. “Seventeen people saying, ‘I’ve never been on a song with Leslie. Can I play on that one?’ It was inevitable. There’s certain things in life that you need to try to achieve, and being on a Feist tune is one of them.”
But sometimes you pass the hot potato to someone and there’s no one there to catch it, like while making “The Call.” “Newf and I were so excited when we first started making that song,” Whiteman remembers. “We only had a drum loop, another percussion loop, a chord progression, and maybe one other thing, but at that point, we knew we had to stop. If we kept adding, people would get turned off. You have to leave space for other people. But I was excited anyway. I kept thinking, ‘Whoever gets to sing on this song is gonna kill it.’” He throws his arms up in the air. “And then no one picked it up! I kept bothering Brendan, saying ‘Dude, lay down some fucking bass! Come on, man!’ And no one did anything! I couldn’t believe it.” In the end, Whiteman himself had to take point, although touring vocalist Jill Harris did hop on to duet. He’s satisfied with how it turned out, but, well, not entirely. “To be honest, the version of ‘The Call’ that lives in here,” he says, pointing to his own temple, “is a different version, and kicks ass over the album version.”
Whiteman isn’t actually mad about it, though. “That’s just part of being in this group,” he acquiesces. “You have to give things up! You must let go of control just to get shit done. There’s too many of us to do anything else. You know, anarchism and anarchy, they’re beautiful utopic thoughts, and they can work for short periods of time in specific places. But to get something done sometimes, there has to be someone doing it; the decision does have to reside somewhere.” As much as he demands the death of mid-tempo music, his favorite song on the record is a ballad: Kevin’s ode to his mom, “Think of You.” He also loves Lisa Lobsinger’s “Relief,” which he calls “the hookiest thing ever” and a “bubblegum classic.”
Most of the time, it’s about compromise—a word, Drew points out in our conversation, that has multiple meanings: compromise as in to come to an agreement, and compromise as in to put something in danger. Broken Social Scene might talk a big game about friendship, but don’t get it twisted: when they talk about friendship as a crucial force, they don’t mean it in a hokey, “our souls are one” way. Sometimes, friendship is hating one another’s guts and coming together anyway. As Feist sang twenty-four years ago on You Forgot It in People: “We’ve got love and hate / It’s the only way.”
They are, after all, called Broken Social Scene for a reason. It’s true that the group started out impossibly tight knit, but that closeness is what caused cracks to form in the first place. “We all fell in love with each other back in that era,” Drew says. “That was an era where we kept looking around, trying not to fall in love with each other, but because of the immense skydiving adventurous emotion we were dealing with every day, it was just hard not to love who you were with.That caused as many problems as it caused joy.” Now the band is simply not as close as it used to be—but that’s not a bad thing. That’s just part of growing up. “I do think, though, that if anyone called anyone and said they were in trouble, people would drop what they were doing. That’s friendship.” It’s true: we fight because we love each other. We fuck up because we’re trying.
Whiteman recalls listening to “Not Around Anymore” and finding wrong, clashing notes, six different bass parts, and “total mistakes everywhere.” “That’s true for the whole record. There are actually so many problems and inconsistencies—and thank God,” he emphasizes. “The flaws are to be celebrated. I didn’t title it, but that’s what Remember the Humans is about for me: human frailty, the human ability to make mistakes. In this era of AI and optimization and efficiency, we need to push back against this idea of a ‘perfect society’ as much as possible. We don’t want that. Let’s not look for perfection. Let’s look for each other instead.”
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
Keep scrolling for more great stories.