The upcoming album of Fredericton’s Wicked Vices has the band pulling from their backlog of material, with a few tracks emerging from more than a couple of years ago. The previously released on-the-road rocker “Butterfly” had been pieced together at the beginning of the pandemic, while their late-night summer jam “Liquor” has been around almost as long as the band has.
Their newest single, “Athlone St.”, finds its foundations in a riff from all the way back in 2017. While that’s something of a testament to the band’s longevity—let’s be honest, four years is more like forty in band years—the song is actually about the rifts that nearly tore the band apart.
“It’s the favourited track on the record for the band members, which is kind of meta and ironic as it’s about our struggles,” says Wicked Vices’ drummer Ryan Barrie, “but I think it’s because we left it all in the studio for that song.”
“Athlone St.” started as a riff that former band member Logan Colter showed the band back in 2017—even prior to having joined Wicked Vices, while he and Barrie were both playing as members of Mrs. Hippie. Though Colter had stepped away from Wicked Vices over two years ago, he did return to record guitar on the track.
The rest of the song had been penned by Barrie and Geoff MacDonald on the patio at Fredericton’s Cannon’s Cross, on the occasion of MacDonald’s birthday.
“It was his birthday, so I took him out for lunch and bought him a muff dive,” says Barrie, and apparently, the meal came with a side of band beef.
“Over the years there were some butting head moments. I also don’t want to paint the picture that we all hate each other,” laughs Barrie. “Cause that’s not the case. It comes with being in a band. It’s like you’re married to four other people.”
Having cathartically worked out their grievances in the form of a voice memo, in sticking with the song’s theme conflict and miscommunications the phone mislabeled the track as “Athlone St.”. Despite the bizarre nature of the label, it somehow stuck.
“The phone saves it under whatever location you’re at and misread the GPS, I guess,” says Barrie. “It was a fluke and we thought it sounded cool.”
And then it sat on the back burner for a few years. The band say they’re proud of their new track, it just needed some extra time to perfect. In fact, they didn’t finish piecing it together until February 2021.
Fortunately, whatever bee had gotten under the band’s bonnet has worked its way out. Barrie says it’s hard to even point to any specific examples; it’s just the sort of thing you endure when being in a band, on the road, in hotel rooms, on stages, all of the time.
Wicked Vices’ upcoming album In Moderation, is set to be released sometime in 2022.