Edmonton’s Softklub — the duo of Keenan Gregory and Mark Wojcicki — have just dropped their debut EP ‘Give Me More’, and it’s the kind of release that sneaks up on you. Five tracks deep into melancholic indie rock territory, the EP digs into longing, self-doubt, and the way certain memories just refuse to let go. It’s heavy stuff, but Softklub make it feel cathartic rather than crushing.
“This selection of songs feels more tightly knit to each other than anything else we’ve written,” Keenan explains.
Not only do their themes bleed into one another, but multiple songs share a narrative from the same moment in my life.
That cohesion makes sense once you learn the EP’s backstory — recorded piecemeal across hotel rooms, Airbnbs, home studios, rehearsal spaces, and proper studios over several years. It’s a patchwork process that somehow produced something remarkably unified, with extra musicians brought in along the way to widen the sonic scope.
The Title Track: Yearning, Distilled
The emotional centerpiece is the soaring title track Give Me More, a song built entirely around unresolved feelings. Keenan doesn’t mince words about where it came from:
A lifetime supply of yearning, mixed with some unrequited love and a fixated obsession of the past.
What’s wild is that this song — now the EP’s anchor — wasn’t even supposed to be a Softklub song. It started as an instrumental demo Mark wrote during COVID lockdown while toying with the idea of rebooting an old band. He sent it to Keenan hoping for some piano. Instead, Keenan sent back vocals.
“I had never heard him sing, but it was exactly the vibe I wanted,” Mark says.
We continued writing together with zero expectations or even thinking about releasing anything. All of a sudden we realized we had 30+ songs we really enjoyed.
That’s basically the Softklub origin story in a nutshell — two guys writing for the joy of it until they accidentally had an entire catalog on their hands.
Sonically, Give Me More doesn’t shy away from going big. Mark cites seeing The National live — with their multiple drummers and sprawling arrangements — as direct inspiration for the track’s layered percussion, stacked guitars, and synth textures. It’s a song built for repeat listens, with new details revealing themselves each time through.
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