Canadian indie rockers Hollerado haven’t forgotten their roots. Frontman Menno Versteeg will tell you the title of their upcoming record White Paint goes all the way back to his elementary school days.
“I was playing around, doing some painting, and I remembered this thing I used to do when I was a kid in elementary school,” the singer recalled over the phone from Toronto.
As Versteeg explains, it took a lot of paper, crayons, and white paint.
In fact, along with bandmates Dean Baxter, Nixon Boyd, and Jake Boyd, he will be personally tending to album and record art for the first run of the album, which is due out in February 2013.
“We’re gonna have thousands and thousands of hand-painted records and CDs for the first run.”
It’s been three years since their debut album, the suitably titled Record In a Bag (which was sold in Ziploc bags, complete with confetti), and Versteeg says that while the jangly lead single, “Pick Me Up,” sounds similar to their previous collection, he promised there are some pretty big leaps made elsewhere.
“There’s territory we’ve never gone into before, for sure. That’s what I’m excited for people to hear the most.”
It’s tough to imagine Hollerado getting heavy on us. But Versteeg said as the band members grow up and mature, so does the band.
“Some of those songs in Record were written five years ago,” he said. “That’s a lot of life between now and then. You mellow out a bit, your views on things change. It would just be wrong if the album was the same . . . Something wouldn’t be real about it.”
Though they’d been long-time best friends, music wasn’t always the career path for the group.
“[Boyd] was three years into an engineering degree when he quit to do this full-time. I didn’t want to give up on playing music for my life, and so I guess I kinda convinced the rest of them to drop out too,” Versteeg joked.
“I don’t have a regret, that’s for sure.”
In a notoriously fickle and unforgiving business, the group has managed to carve a sizeable name for itself, and the reason is no mystery. It’s their chemistry.
“You hear about bands that don’t like each other. We have our moments, like we’ve gotten in fist fights before. But we’re really, really close, like brothers that get in fist fights. We love each other five minutes later, it’s the only way you can do it,” Versteeg said.
After a hefty tour of the central United States with electro-pop band Passion Pit, the group will be hitting some Ontario venues with fellow Canadian act Tokyo Police Club in December.
An Ottawa native, Versteeg said that it’s a different kind of rush to play in their hometown.
“Playing all these places is so neat, in your hometown. We played Bluesfest, it’s like ‘whoa,’ you know. I never thought we’d get to play Bluesfest.”
Catching Hollerado live shows the kind of chemistry the four have. Their performances are famously energetic and riotous, and above all, fun.
“You get all walks of life, and they’re coming together with a common love of something. That’s the best part. There’s a lot of BS that goes around with being a band. The best thing by far is that hour that you get to play your instrument [live].”
The sophomore release White Paint is due out in February of next year.
In the meantime, Hollerado will be playing along with Tokyo Police Club in Ottawa on Dec. 14 at Ritual Nightclub.
