Halifax rockers Alert The Medic are ahead of schedule on their upcoming album, ‘Let Them Have Their Fun’, and they’ve used the extra time in the recording studio to bang out a cover of The Tragically Hip’s ‘Grace, Too’.
The band began recording their fourth full length record back in February at Toronto’s Revolution Recording with Phil Hotz and former Our Lady Peace/current Crash Karma guitarist Mike Turner.
This is the second album Alert The Medic has produced under the direction of Turner, who can be seen on guitar in the video. Turner also produced Alert The Medic’s third album ‘The Phantom Moves’ in 2014.
“We are all huge Our Lady Peace fans so Mike’s been a big influence for us growing up and continues to be today,” says bassist Matt Campbell. “We’ve been lucky to work with him over the last four years. Working with one of our musical idols still has us pinching ourselves.”
Of course, if you’re going to work with one multi-platinum Canadian music legend, you might as well cover another one. With The Tragically Hip still in the first year of their unofficial semi-retirement from touring, and frontman Gord Downie currently a strong contender for Most Popular Man in Canada, there have been a plethora of homages to ‘Canada’s Band’. Campbell says that the decision to cover ‘Grace, Too’ off The Tragically Hip’s 1994 release ‘Day For Night’ all came together on the fly.
“We worked really hard during pre-production of the album and oddly enough finished ahead of schedule. So we showed up to the studio really unsure about what we were going to be doing and Mike suggested we record a cover for fun,” says Campbell. “Someone brought up doing a Hip tune and there’s so many to choose from but we wanted to pick one we thought we could put a little bit of our own spin on but yet paid a nice tribute to the band.”
‘Let Them Have Their Fun’ is expected to come out late this summer, but the band says there will be a single along in the next month or so.
“The new album is coming along great! We’re mixing everything at the moment so it’s nice hearing everything fall in to place… We took a totally different approach to recording this one than we have in the past. We recorded this off the floor in hopes to capture our live energy a little more. We also used some different instrumentation that we’ve never used before. All in all it’s definitely an Alert The Medic sounding record but hopefully people continue to hear the growth of the band.”
Alert The Medic expect to do a full tour in the Fall with the release of the album. In the meantime the band are preparing for a busy festival season, including Live 105 Spring Fling in Halifax on May 6th, and Rock n’ Rhum in St Pierre et Miquelon supporting The Tea Party.