One fairly common trope used to describe bands in today’s age is to highlight their ability to capture the anxiety and frustration felt by the working class within late-stage capitalism. That said, music is often an outlet for people to find an expression of their lived reality, and that so many artists have something to say about the personal and political crises created by the bourgeoisie is not to be dismissed as a lack of creativity, but as a collective call for a sweeping end to a system built on destructively exploiting mass human and non-human populations of the Earth.
One band who expresses this sentiment with a particularly poetic intensity is the Kingston-based duo Funeral Lakes. The project of Chris Hemer and Sam Mishos came bursting onto the scene with the release of their self-titled debut album in December 2019. With a gorgeously expansive folk rock sound and songwriting depicting the frustration and fear that arises the bleak realities of the Anthropocene Age, the album evokes both the beauty of the natural world and the darkness felt as it burns via matches lit by extractive capital and its many right-wing grifters and goblins. They followed the album up with the 2020 EP Golden Season, a release with an urgency reflected in energetic tempos and justified rage at petromasculinity, necropolitics, and the overwhelming dystopia of life in a world teetering on the edge of collapse.
Just as the urgent problems that Funeral Lakes explores in their music have yet to be resolved, so continues the band’s run of compelling and attention-demanding releases. This past Friday saw the arrival of the Redeemer EP, and this time the duo dives into the strained relationship between faith and justice, and deciding whether to let go of one’s belief in systems that fail to make good on the promises of equitable prosperity and salvation that the mythology constructed around them leads their followers to believe in. As they often do, Funeral Lakes poses these ambitious questions from a very personal place, and thus offers plenty for listeners to reflect on and identify with.
Funeral Lakes joined Honey on the Knife for discussion on Redeemer, faith, and cultivating hope in these trying times. You can listen to the EP and read the interview below.
Redeemer is described as an exploration of the meanings of faith and justice and the tensions between them. What drove you to write about these themes?
These themes have always been present in our music, but to varying degrees. They’re universal, but we tried to approach them from our own standpoints. Being at home for the past year or so has meant spending a lot of time with our thoughts, reflecting on the past and old memories. We both spent formative years at catholic schools, which, whether we like it or not, has informed our lives. Critically reflecting on these experiences and concepts has been a constant, so this collection of songs is just one iteration of that.
I find myself reflecting on my own religious upbringing while listening to “Solstice.” What ideas or experiences did you seek to express with that song in particular, and as the lead single, what role does it play in introducing the EP’s larger narrative(s)?
Solstice is a reflection on the experience of questioning what one knows and believes in. Ultimately a breaking point is reached at which we have to decide where to draw the line, while also grappling with the possibility that, whether we like it or not, we’re all in this together. We put a lot of thought into sequencing, and we saw Solstice as the best song to introduce the overarching narrative and themes that we confront throughout the rest of the EP. It can be interpreted as a larger narrative about religion or capitalism, but there are also very personal memories and emotions woven into the songs.
Having done that questioning, growing older, and possibly finding new causes or values to believe in, what are your current relationships with religion/spirituality like?
Neither of us are currently practicing any religion, although we can appreciate the value of spirituality. What we take issue with is religious institutions with huge amounts of centralized power, money, and influence. After observing a great deal of hypocrisy and abuse of power within this sort of institution, we both fail to see what good it really does. Being a decent person, treating others with respect and kindness – these should just be universal values, irrespective of religion.
One of the questions that Redeemer asks is “what does it mean to be irredeemable?” On your previous EP Golden Season, the final line in the closing track Power Trip is “Who lives? And who dies?”
Between these questions over who/what is worth saving, how would you compare the way in which they are posed, and can be answered, on each respective release?
With the song Power Trip off our last EP, we’re talking specifically about necropolitics. It’s a rhetorical question that we posed to shed light on some of the bleak realities of our current world, and the way a single decision somewhere can reverberate across the globe. With Redeemer, we were thinking more about the question of forgiveness as it relates to justice. In other words, how can you be expected to forgive or to accept something in the absence of justice? This could be about forgiving someone who has wronged you personally, or it could be about being told to accept something that is out of your control. Ultimately, forgiveness and justice look different to every person. So, what we think and what someone else might take away from these songs could be very different.
There’s Got To Be Something Better Soon is a song that hits especially hard for me. Its title suggests a sense of desperation for something different, and the lyrics seem to convey a defeated state through the noting of a lack of change and the repeated motif of one’s heart breaking.
Throughout your discography, you two have repeatedly taken aim at various aspects of white supremacist colonial climate-destroying capitalism, and while resistance continues to grow, it can be hard to avoid the feeling as if we are losing the battle against the status quo. How do you cope with this sense of loss, maintain a sense of hope and put the heart back together again?
Like many others, we’re still trying to find the answers to these questions. We know that solutions to some of the biggest issues of our time are out there, but what’s often missing is political will, so that’s something that we hold on to. Of course, it can be incredibly difficult to maintain a sense of hope every day, but we make an effort to avoid falling into the trap of nihilism. This was a big part of why we started this project – we had been feeling extremely lost and were struggling to find hope. Music offered us a lifeline, as it has many times before. It has always helped us to feel less alone in what we’re going through, so hearing that our songs are resonating with folks means a lot to us. That might sound cheesy, but we really do mean it.
Cheesy or not, I think that finding shared experience within music is one of the artform’s greatest appeals for anyone passionately engaged in it as a creator and/or listener.
If you were to look through your discography and pick one song that most clearly illustrates the purpose/essence of Funeral Lakes so far, which one would you choose?
Eternal Return off of our EP Golden Season is probably the closest we’ve gotten so far. It has an energy and structure that we gravitate toward. The bulk of the song is spent laying out a narrative, so that by the time we get to the turnaround, there’s an understanding between us and the listener as to why we’re shouting/where we’re coming from. It also encapsulates a lot of the themes we cover, even down to the title of the song.
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The Redeemer EP arrives on August 20, 2021. You can support Funeral Lakes by purchasing the release here.
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