Crown Lands know well the cost of artistic integrity. In 2020, the Ontario duo – Cody Bowles (vocals/drums) and Kevin Comeau (guitar/keyboards/bass) – were the hottest tip in blues rock, backed by Universal Canada for their self-titled debut and toasted as Breakthrough Group at Canada’s Juno Awards. But when the pair decided – on 2023’s appropriately titled Fearless – that their hearts beat to a proggier time signature, the industry turned cold on them.
Now, as they release new album Apocalypse, they tell us they prefer to be on the bottom rung of a ladder they actually want to climb, rather than a higher rung of one they don’t.
How pleased are you with Apocalypse?
Cody Bowles: Grooviest thing we’ve ever done, man.
Kevin Comeau: It really is. On the first album, we were still trying to hide our progressive tendencies, through fear of not being accepted.
CB: We wanted to be in the cool club.
KC: But when we released Context: Fearless Pt I, that was the big watershed moment when we realised people wanted to hear that grandiose style. And then Starlifter: Fearless Pt II was when we turned everything up to eleven. That song is eighteen minutes long.
But you’ve topped it with Apocalypse’s title track.
KC: Yeah. When we started playing Starlifter live, we were like, “There’s no way we’re ever gonna be able to pull this off.”
CB: It was too technical, too crazy.
KC: But somehow we did – even though I had to get a custom double-neck to make it work. Now, Starlifter is just our warm-up song, so we needed to push it even further and make a nineteen-minute song. Apocalypse may be the song that actually beats us.
What, briefly, is the story behind this new album?
CB: We created the character of Blackstar, who’s this super-evil guy and the right hand of the Syndicate. In the story, he conquers this planet and decimates its people. But amid the fighting over the spoils of war, on the Syndicate’s home world there’s a civil war, and when Blackstar returns, his wife and child have been killed. There’s the line: ‘Hate begets hate.’ We wanted to dig into the concepts of oppression and the cycle of hatred. We put it in this awesome sci-fi story, but it echoes what we see in the world today.
KC: But something that gives me hope is that after last year’s election, we’ve seen a huge shift in Canada. We were gazing into the abyss of the alt-right movement, and about to elect our version of Trump, but everyone just pulled out and said: “No”.
If you could live in any fantasy realm, where would you choose?
CB: It’s a constant debate in my house, like, would you go to Rivendell or the Shire? It’s tough. Rivendell is beautiful, but there’s a coldness to the beauty, whereas the Shire is like a warm hug. I wouldn’t hang out with Gollum, though. I don’t trust that guy. Maybe I’d go to the glade where Tom Bombadil is chilling and have a nice cup of tea with him.
What’s your favourite story from the album sessions?
CB: We recorded Through The Looking Glass at [producer] Nick Raskulinecz’s [Foo Fighters, Rush, Alice In Chains…] studio…
KC: We were watching the old Godzilla movies and Alien: Romulus. We got all these gummies and we were just blitzed.
Going back to Starlifter, how did Universal Canada react when you wanted to release it as a single?
KC: I mean, poorly. Shawn Marino, who was our A&R guy, is a fantastic human, and at our first studio session he sat at the piano and played [Genesis’s] Firth Of Fifth. So I knew he’d understand everything we wanted to do. However, he’s also under the constraints of answering to higher-ups at the label, so I know the awkward position we put him in. There’s very few people in that major-label world that would be supportive, and we give everyone at Universal all the love. They really helped us out. But there was an understanding at the end of the Fearless campaign, like: “This is the last album we’re doing together”.
What was your attitude to being dropped?
KC: We owed the label, like, half a million dollars. There was no way we’re gonna pay that back. We will never see a dime from the self-titled record, White Buffalo, Wayward Flyers, Fearless. They own those records in perpetuity, so hopefully they recoup their loss from us, eventually. It was really good for us to be on that label at the time, and it’s really good to be on InsideOut now.
Are you planning to bring Apocalypse to the UK?
KC: No, we’re not. We had a very difficult discussion about it yesterday. Our management showed us a budget where if we went over to the UK and Europe to play ten shows, we would lose about thirty-five thousand dollars. The reality of being a musician means you need to have very rich parents, the willingness to completely financially ruin yourself, or a label with very deep pockets. And unfortunately we have none of those things.
Have you managed to get your Rush tickets yet?
KC: I’m working on it. I’ve got some connections. Because, again, being a progressive rock band in the year of our Lord 2026 means we do not have a thousand dollars for a ticket.
CB: I love them so much, but my last memory of Rush was with Neil [Peart], and I don’t want my last memory to be Rush without Neil, because he was my hero. I wish them all the best, and I’m there in spirit.
Finally, what sort of apocalypse would you prefer – killer robots, or zombies?
KC: If we’re just getting it over with, then killer robots are gonna be way more effective.
CB: Yeah, the robots aren’t going to slowly rip you limb from limb. It’s way cleaner.
Apocalypse is out now via Inside Out.