Half Moon Run
14th September 2023

“I’m proud of the fact that, as we live and grow, we’re able to continue to make music that evolves and changes and seems to be meaningful,” Conner Molander observes as his band, Half Moon Run, crosses the 10th-anniversary mark. B.C natives Molander and Dylan Phillips connected with Ottawa expat Devon Portielje in the Mile End a few years after Arcade Fire had put the city on the international indie-rock map. Half Moon Run forged a singular sound that looked beyond Montreal’s past and future toward the realm of the timeless. Theirs is a sound that inspires all sorts of colorful, contradictory descriptors—folk music for the modern dark age, art rock for harmony-pop enthusiasts, rustic indie anthems for neoclassical heads—but no matter what you call it, the physical and emotional responses among listeners is always the same: heartbeats accelerate, goosebumps rise, eye sockets well up.

From the moment Half Moon Run dropped their 2012 debut album, Dark Eyes, they no longer belonged to Montreal, but to the world at large. As the album’s pulse-quickening lead single, “Full Circle,” galloped up the alternative charts in Canada, a U.S. deal with Glassnote Records landed them in the upper reaches of Billboard’s Heatseekers list.

And for many of the group’s fans around the world, Half Moon Run is a restless six-armed organism that can seemingly swap instrumental roles on a song-by-song basis—with members bounding between guitars, percussion, keyboards, pedal steel, and back again—while delivering their now-signature three-part harmonies with a telepathic ease. Their third album, A Blemish in the Great Light was Half Moon Run’s highest charting release in Canada to date (debuting at No. 3) and landed them their first Juno Award for Adult Alternative Album of the Year. During international year-plus lockdown, Half Moon Run kept their heads above water with stopgap releases like the Seasons of Change EP (a collection of leftovers from the Blemish sessions) and their popular Covideo Sessions series on YouTube, where the band reworked selections from their back catalogue in split-screen virtual jam sessions, with each member performing their parts in isolation at their respective homes. (The results were eventually compiled on the namesake 2020 LP.) New EP “Inwards & Onwards” is now available.