Francy Planet’s Brain Freeze Turns a Parking Lot Slushee Into a Time Machine

Francy Planet is the solo name of François Goudreault Jr., a London, Ontario songwriter who first found a clean line through music as the frontman of Hello Kelly. He has stuttered since childhood. Onstage and on record the words arrive without the snag that follows them through ordinary speech, which is why the project has always treated melody as more than style. It is a working method. Hello Kelly came up in Ontario’s mid-2000s pop-rock circuit, put records out through 7Spin Music, and later returned with Sweet Nostalgia, the album that won Goudreault Producer/Engineer of the Year at the 2022 Forest City London Music Awards. In 2012 the Stuttering Foundation honoured him with its Converting Awareness into Action award. CBC sat with him in November 2025 after RETCON, a debut that arrived as two objects at once: twelve tracks of ’90s-facing alt-rock and a book of science fiction short stories. The comics term in the title is the point. A retcon goes back into the plot and changes what already happened. Brain Freeze, out now, is the first single in a run toward a new album planned for summer 2027. He has already written the punchline into the song. You can retcon your existence but still never find the plot.

Doctors have a name for the flash of pain that arrives when something too cold hits the palate. Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. The sensation is real. The address is wrong. Blood vessels in the mouth tighten, then open, and the trigeminal nerve files the alarm in the forehead, as if the threat were happening somewhere it is not. Referred pain. The body tells the truth and mislabels the room. That is a strange place to start a guitar song, and it is the right one. Nostalgia works by the same misfire. A taste lands in the present and the feeling reports from 1994. The parking lot is a Circle K in Orangeville. It used to be a Mac’s Milk, the store Goudreault biked to as a kid for Nintendo Power magazines and the bright, chemical cold of a slushee. Same building, thirty years apart. He got the headache and watched the years collapse. “For about four seconds you’re five and thirty and fifty all at once,” he says. “You get this terrifying glimpse of every version of yourself, and then it’s gone and you have to go back to your actual life.”

The lyric treats that four-second error like lab work. Blue and yellow slime pulled from the machine. A neon green monstrosity held up to the light like a chemist who has lost the experiment. Coke and grape and lime swirling with the end of August. He does not want one flavour. He needs everything at once, the childhood greed of mixing the taps until the cup looks radioactive, hoping the mess might finally make him feel like himself. Then the chorus spends the freeze all at once. Nine and twenty-seven in the same blink. Later five and fifty-seven. Every me I ever was for one drink. The years turn into a kaleidoscope, pretty and useless, and identity thins into a smear until the pain clears. Growing up gets the coldest line in the song. You don’t grow out of this. You just get taller by mistake. Adulthood arrives as a biological accident, extra height with the same frightened kid still inside it.

Produced and mixed by GI Holm, the track was told to stay simple while it got louder. Goudreault wanted to pile things on. Holm told him to leave the shape alone. You can hear that decision in the way the verses keep a tighter grip and the chorus opens the chords into a wide, singable wall. Big drums. Crunchy guitars. A bright, pushed vocal that wants company on the hook. The press points toward Weezer’s chorus size, The Dirty Nil’s bite, and a Canadian alt-rock line that runs through Our Lady Peace. The closer cousins are the bands that treat sugar and dread as the same ingredient. Games We Play. DURRY. Power-pop with a bruise under the enamel.

The bridge is where the freeze stops being a trick and becomes a measurement. 1994 stays inside the circle. He used to ride his bike and now he only ever drives. The bicycle still means wandering. The car means getting there because you have to. Summers burn down. The leaves get loud. Reality collapses in the cold and he chooses to stay inside it, masochistic existential daydream and all, because that is the only temperature where the child and the adult can occupy the same body without arguing about the calendar. RETCON asked whether you could edit the season that already aired. Brain Freeze answers with a smaller, colder joke. The rewrite lasts as long as the headache. After that you are back in the car, taller by mistake, driving past the store that used to sell you a different life in a paper cup.

He plays Sneaky Dee’s in Toronto on October 3, his first solo date with a full band, on a bill with Monday Big, Us Villains, and Mirage. More singles are promised through 2026. The slushee will melt. The four seconds will keep arriving for anyone who still knows the taste.

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Brain Freeze is out now.

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