Proud Dads offer a modern bedroom pop take on the words of Ozymandias, king of king, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” and the idea that all our effort might be in vain as we waste away in a pandemic-induced limbo. Born of the idles of quarantine, “Leap Year,” the band’s debut single, summarizes just that — a year that effectively might have skipped over.
Despite that melancholic message, Proud Dads drown their woes in reverbed-soaked guitars, letting the vocals take a backseat to far more upbeat instrumentals. It makes for a song that is very much suited to blissfully losing yourself in and letting all that bad noise wash away.
“‘Leap Year’ started while I was messing around with a delay pedal and started playing a song I had written a few months prior,” explains Pothier (guitar/vocals). “I tweaked the riff a little bit to make it work as a loop, and that ended up being the first guitar track in the song.”
The resulting demo, despite its rough state, was fired off to Jon MacKenzie and Aaron Hillier, who Pothier had already been playing with the last couple of years as part of Braden Lam and the Driftwood People. The silver lining of quarantine meant they had plenty of time to play around with the demo to get it just right.
“In a way, the ‘Leap Year’ demo kinda started Proud Dads, but the three of us couldn’t really create the live experience we envisioned and were working towards with ‘Leap Year’,” says Pothier. “Jon was already friends with Tow [Chowdhury] and knew he was this phenomenal guitar player so bringing him in was a no-brainer.”
The song emerged with live shows in mind, perfectly capturing the vibe you want to experience at some late-night festival side stage, bathed in the glow of a dozen coloured lights and packed against the sweaty bodies of a hundred other euphoric humans.
The band say that finding that vibe was a priority for the song, while the necessity of the circumstances and their particular skill set, allowed them to lean in to get it done. Sticking with a DIY work process, the whole of the song was recorded in MacKenzie’s basement.
“We took pretty much every mic we had in our possession to mic up Aaron’s kit,” says Pothier. “That was honestly what we were most worried about. It’s so easy to settle for kinda flat-sounding drums, especially with a bit more lo-fi stuff, but we wanted to make everything sound as good as possible.”
Growing up listening to punk and hardcore bands, Pothier says the process of doing everything themselves, especially after undergoing a full studio production with Braden Lam, felt more much comfortable to him. Having MacKenzie on the team also proved to be invaluable with an in-house producer willing to put in the extra time to perfect the details.
“He’s basically a wizard,” says Pothier. “Personally, I was totally cool with how it was sounding. Jon was actually the one pushing for us to get it mastered, and at the end of the day, that was a great call. We got it mastered by Rob Kleiner in LA, and that’s the only outsourcing we did for the track itself.
While the song is largely instrumental, emphasizing a laid-back groove—in fact, remaining entirely instrumental until late in the production—the lyrics provide a subtle but substantial counterpoint, even as barely coherent window-dressing. Pulled from another song that Pothier had let fall by the wayside, they provide a fine but rare example of this approach adding an immersive texture to the song,
“They fit the vibes we were going for so well, I’m really happy with how that turned out and it was great to get me and Tow singing on the track,” says Pothier.
Sing away! We’ll blissfully pretend like we’re halfway to oblivion in the middle of some field bursting with strangers.