Kestrels release new single ‘Lilys’ + new LP ‘Better Wonder’

Kestrels press photo
Press Photo Credit to Riley Taylor

Halifax shoegaze trio Kestrels announce lush new album Better Wonder, arriving Feb. 14th via Darla Records. Lead single Lilys is out now, watch the video below featuring Weird Nightmare via YouTube.


Chad Peck says about the song: “I wrote this song while housebound as the result of a classic east coast snowstorm. The verses are declarative statements on top of deceptively ambiguous chords, and the choruses are unanswered questions under very stable chords. I love that juxtaposition: uneasy both ways. The song introduces the themes of the album: why you’re awake in the middle of the night, the uncanny effects of self-imposed isolation, and the implied hope of tomorrow. The outro has huge guitars careening in and out of the mix. I captured that overwhelming sound I loved when I was a kid and continue to chase: that feeling that the music can’t get loud enough but you keep trying anyway. The title is a nod to Kurt Heasley’s band Lilys, one of the all time greats. Alex Edkins from Metz/Weird Nightmare heard an early mix of the song and asked to sing those fantastic harmonies on the choruses. We were in the same studio as Jane Siberry when Agnello was mixing this song. She told me I made great choices and wrote me a lovely note about what it means to be an artist.”

When you think of the kind of musician who quotes Jame Joyce’s Ulysses on the regular, you’re probably picturing some kind of nerd-rock impresario in a pork pie hat and glasses going hard on a squeezebox. Chad Peck is none of those things — although he probably wouldn’t knock you if you threw out the word “nerd.”

A high school English teacher from the wilds of Canada with equal love in his heart for Stephen Dedalus, the Beach Boys, and oceans of fuzz, the frontman of shoegaze rock outfit Kestrels is primed to drop his most ambitious record yet, ‘Better Wonder,’ via Darla Records on February 14, 2025. It’s a nighttime delirium of an album that wrestles with love, loss, and the culmination of a life in pursuit — of what, Peck’s still not sure.

Kestrels is an ever-changing project first formed in 2008 that has seen Peck playing with a wide cast of characters — J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. included — and opening for the likes of Bob Mould. The lineup this time around features bassist Jim MacAlpine (Weird Nightmare) and drummer Michael Catano (North of America), who also played on Dream. John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Alvvays, Kurt Vile, Cyndi Lauper) and mastering engineer Greg Calbi (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Television, Blondie) also lent a hand.

A combination of tracks from a decade-old scrapped solo release and songs written while in isolation in 2021, Better Wonder is “a nighttime record riddled with anxiety written during a weird time,” Peck says. “I had lived alone in the woods most of my adult life and I loved that lifestyle in a lot of ways. But during that time period there was so much change and tumult and those feelings of insanity at three in the morning. I was trying to capture it in a murky, uncomfortable sound.”

The result is a woozy, disorienting suite of tracks, like finding a secret station between channels on a late-night drive. Give in to the gloom.

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