Toronto alt-roots band Lazarettes are a Toronto music collective currently playing out in support of their most recent album Sweet Misery (produced by Ron Hawkins of the Lowest of the Low). The album's first single, “Knock is at the Door”, is accompanied by a video from director Chris Pozzobon that features a rogues gallery of the last hundred years of authoritarianism.  It's a call to action anthem that asks what are you waiting for? As Steve Stanley, one of Canada's journeymen songwriters and host of Northern Wish radio, says, "artists standing up against fascism is where it's at." Lazarettes began as a collective of musicians featuring members of Fembots and Sour Landslide, releasing records and performing in and around Toronto, Canada.  When the call came to play a release party and not all the collective could muster, principal songwriter Chris Tait called on guitarist Richard Peirce, songwriter/musician Bryce Thomas, bassist Chris Monster and legendary drummer Adam Warner to fill the void.  Quick chemistry in rehearsal and on-stage led to Lazarettes drawing closer together to become the band that would make the album Sweet Misery.   Writing for the band with co-writers Peirce and Thomas, the group workshopped, broke down the songs and cracked them open to find the essence. Ron Hawkins, long a friend of the group's members, joined on to helm the recording at Union Sound with engineer Chris Stringer.  What happened next was three days of bottling the lightning the band suddenly found themselves riding. Today, the band is coming into its own with a raucous live show featuring  sharp, literate songwriting, driving rhythm and singalong harmonies.  Lazarettes are aimed at your heart and your head. A new full-length album arrives in October.

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Ron Hawkins has long been revered as one of Canada’s greatest contemporary singer-songwriters. He boasts a celebrated catalogue over 20 records deep. Some are solo offerings, others feature backing bands the Do Good Assassins or Rusty Nails, and some, of course, find him fronting the almighty Lowest of the Low, whose iconic LP Shakespeare My Butt continues to dominate lists of “essential Canadian albums” to this day. As lead singer/multi-instrumentalist and main songwriter of Canada’s legendary Lowest of the Low, Ron Hawkins has enjoyed many accolades through the years: In 1996, 2000 and again in 2005, Chart Magazine honoured the group’s 1991 debut album, Shakespeare My Butt, with spots in the top 10 of the Top 100 Canadian Albums of All Time. In 2000 and once again in 2015, Hawkins was voted Songwriter of the Year by NOW Magazine’s reader’s poll. In 2000, Ron received Toronto station 102.1 The Edge’s Lifetime Achievement Award; in that same year, Ron Hawkins and the Rusty Nails won album of the year at The Indie Awards, for their album Crackstatic. And in 2008, The Lowest of the Low was inducted into the Canadian Indie Rock Hall of Fame and awarded gold records for Shakespeare My Butt. Over the years, Ron has written and released eight LOTL albums, five solo discs, three records with his band The Rusty Nails, and three records (one a double album) as Ron Hawkins and The Do Good Assassins — plus a commemorative vinyl box set, Shakespeare My Box, that encapsulates the entire Lowest of the Low catalogue. Hawkins dips into that formidable songbook for his solo sets. 

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FemBots are a Toronto based band led by the songwriting team of Brian Poirier and David MacKinnon. Formed in 1997 as a home recording experiment the project took on a life of it’s own, eclipsing the duo’s “real” band and becoming their main focus. FemBots sound draws on folk, Americana, classic soul music and often includes found sounds and everyday items repurposed as musical instruments. Over the course of their first ten-year run FemBots transformed from a duo, playing instruments raided from thrift stores and dumpsters, into a full band with a line up drawing on a who’s who of the Toronto indie scene. They released four critically acclaimed records between 2000 and 2008. After a decade of recording and touring the band took what was supposed to be a short break. The break lasted almost ten years. In 2018 FemBots were asked to provide music for the CBC series Farm Crime. Their rekindled collaboration led to an outpouring of new music. The result of that spark is Transfigurations, the first FemBots release in 14 years. Joined by long time collaborators Nathan Lawr and Greg Smith the band digs deep into an acoustic set of songs about love, loss and mortality largely informed by the loss of MacKinnon’s wife to cancer in 2020. Transfigurations is a spare and bare-bones record compared to its predecessors. Gone is the exotic instrumentation and orchestrations of their previous work. In its place is an unadorned directness that put’s their words and voices front and centre.

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