Junior Boys aren’t junior anymore and neither is their sound

Seriously, then, how often do Junior Boys get hit with the most obvious joke in the world now that they’ve been a band for more than 20 years?

“We’re old people now, Ben,” sighed frontman Jeremy Greenspan down the line from a tour date in Nashville. “It literally comes up every show. Every single show someone yells ‘Senior Boys!’ at us.”

Ah, well, at least Greenspan and his longtime production partner, Matt Didemus, are aging gracefully. Junior Boys’ quiet, thoroughly nuanced new album “Waiting Game” — released late last October via transatlantic indie label City Slang — is a model of maturity that finds the pair moving away from the gleaming post-rave dance-pop that’s historically been the Boys’ stock in trade in favour of making the ultimate headphone record.

Junior Boys have always favoured subtlety over taking the most obvious musical route from “A” to “Be,” of course, but “Waiting Game” really does make you wait.

It never really unleashes, just percolates with allusions to a final release that never really comes. If you’re the sort of listener who’s committed to committing to a record until it properly clicks, however, it’s a wondrous thing.

All of the melody and detail and bittersweet popsmithery familiar from the previous five Junior Boys albums is there, there’s just … less … of it there. With more spaces in between. Greenspan’s supple voice is often withdrawn along with the beats, too, and when it does drift into the mix it’s often warped and distorted as if being beamed in from some kind of surrealistic other plane.

This is no accident. Much of “Waiting Game’s” placid, aqueous mood derived from Greenspan’s solitary adventures around Hamilton during the early days of pandemic lockdown when there wasn’t much else to do outside the home but aimlessly wander the streets and the parks by oneself and get inside one’s own head. So he wound up making exactly the sort of record you can pop on your headphones and play quietly while wandering around aimlessly and getting inside your own head.

“A lot of this album was made at a time when I was going on these epic, epic walks right at that time of COVID when you couldn’t do anything,” said Greenspan. “I feel like everybody was in that headspace and it’s almost forgotten now because so much craziness happened after that, but those early COVID days were kind of singular and interesting, just because of the quietness of the world.

“I got really into, like, kayaking and then I got really into aquascaping, which is sort of like planting underwater gardens. I got really into water. So I didn’t want to make a ‘COVID album’ — I wasn’t gonna, like, write songs reflecting politically on the state of the world or anything like that — but I just wanted to acknowledge the quietness of my own life at the time.

“I mean, there’s ‘Waiting Game,’ but basically every song is about that, this state of general calm yet anxiety. There’s a sort of looming dread despite the fact that everything seems quite peaceful. It was an interesting time.”

Left to finish most of the record by himself once the globe-trotting Didemus decamped to Italy just before the pandemic hit, Greenspan sought the advice of pal and fellow Hamilton-area electronic wizard Dan “Caribou” Snaith while trying to settle on a direction for the record.

Greenspan and Didemus — who last collaborated on 2016’s sleek “Big Black Coat” — were in the same headspace even before lockdown, he said, and “knew that we wanted to make a record that was much quieter.” The subsequent turn of global events thus only solidified Junior Boys’ shared resolve to find a way to recontextualize and reset their high-tech sound mid-career.

“We knew that we didn’t want to make a dance record,” said Greenspan. “But when I started working on it, I sent a bunch of these song sketches that Matt and I had done to Dan Snaith, and some of those songs were poppier and some of the songs were some of the weirder ones that made it onto the record. And Dan was really, like, ‘Just lean into the strange stuff.’ And I thought ‘Yeah, that’s kind of where my heart’s at.’ So that’s what I did.

“It’s funny. It’s a bit polarizing in that some people listen to the record and go, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a Junior Boys record’ and then other people think it sounds wildly different than anything we’ve ever done … I just felt like I wasn’t that excited about making a Junior Boys record that sounded like an old Junior Boys record. And if I’m not excited by that then no one’s going to be excited because, you know, it won’t be exciting.”

In keeping with the general “Waiting Game” vibe, then, Junior Boys’ current stage show — which lands in Toronto for a sold-out gig at the Great Hall this Saturday after a long drive from Nashville to Chicago to Detroit earlier in the week — is a model of patience and pacing. And, fortunately for Greenspan and Didemus, Junior Boys fans are happily along for the ride. The new album’s sonic switch-ups haven’t completely alienated their audience.

“I think for people who know the band, like you do, it’s kind of fun to do something that’s different but, like, not different,” said Greenspan. “I think it’s important to stretch yourself out and to make sure that you are, yourself, challenged and that you challenge the notion of what your band can be. But what’s been cool about being able to tour it afterwards is realizing, ‘Oh yeah, people still come to the shows. This is great!’

“The shows have been great. Just good, happy vibes … And we’ve got this show now where we’re trying to play something from everything and it’s gotten to that point in our career now where it’s been 20 years and we’re, like, ‘Man, we’ve got a lot of songs.’ So we play for a pretty long time for us. But we also try to represent the new record so the shows are front-loaded a bit with the new stuff, and then get dancier and more intense as they go on. But it all exists within the same Junior Boys ecosystem.”

Ben Rayner is a Toronto-based journalist and a frequent contributor to the Star’s Culture section. Follow him on Twitter: @ihatebenrayner

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