Broken Social Scene Announce First New Album in Nearly a Decade

Broken Social Scene will release a new album, “Remember the Humans,” their first collection of original material in nearly ten years. The record arrives after a long silence from the collective that, two decades ago, redefined Toronto’s independent music landscape with “You Forgot It in People” and a self-titled 2005 LP.

Kevin Drew, speaking recently in Manhattan, frames the work around mortality and endurance rather than nostalgia. Asked about the relative scarcity of the soaring, cathartic crescendos that lifted early songs like “7/4 (Shoreline)” into indie rock staples, he references absence. “They’re in a graveyard,” he says of some who once fueled that sound. “I don’t know how to embrace denial.” The band, he explains, knew how to go big but that approach no longer felt connected to where its members are now.

The title functions as a plea. Guitarist Andrew Whiteman described the LP in a newsletter as “a recording — in the sense of reckoning, transcribing — of the deaths, illnesses and drastic cultural reformations swirling around us all.” He calls it “a quick glance behind you in order to orient your movement forward.” The album navigates quieter textures, merging the impulse toward ambient work with the band’s more layered instincts. Drew pushes back against early reactions labeling it mellow. “Turn it up,” he says, “because it’s not fucking mellow.”

The project arrives at a moment far removed from 2006, when Drew worried openly about the band becoming a caricature of itself after a whirlwind of commercial attention. Two decades later, the concern is not momentum but memory, and the strange act of carrying on after the people who helped define your life are no longer here to share it.