Boniface - Boniface

Album - new. Release date: 14/02/20 Limited Red vinyl

First 25 Copies come with a Bonus 6 Track CD that features the non-album single and live favourite Phantom Limbs and all of the b-sides to date. The self-titled debut from Canadian solo artist Boniface is a catalogue of their most formative coming-of-age experiences, each moment captured in diary-like detail and set against a magnificently sprawling backdrop. Throughout the album, the musician / producer otherwise known as Micah Visser reflects on falling in love and facing heartbreak whilst struggling with identity, never failing to find an ineffable beauty within all the pain. The result is a body of work both bracingly honest and powerfully exhilarating—an emotional journey that Visser encapsulates as “taking little detours and exploring the times when everything feels perfect".

Growing up in Winnipeg, Visser wrote the songs for the album at home throughout their late teens and early twenties, after shifts at the local coffee shop and lost nights in the city. This intimacy has been preserved on Boniface, the songs largely recorded in the room they were written, and with Visser’s brother Joey and longtime collaborator Micheal Dunn also on hand. After the addition of bassist Carter Dawson, Visser eventually travelled to London to finish up work on the LP with producer / engineer Neil Comber (Charli XCX, M.I.A., Glass Animals) who helped bring Boniface’s lavish arrangements to full and dazzling life.

Delivering delicate piano ballads and breathless dance numbers with equal intensity, Boniface achieved the album’s shapeshifting tone by purposely twisting its emotional arc. Revealing Boniface’s ingenuity as an artist, the moody and magnetic single Keeping Up contrasts its weary perseverance with so many idiosyncratic flourishes: spacey beats, fuzzed-out samples of dial-up static, a majestic trumpet solo. One of the album’s more heavy-hearted moments, Fumbling unfolds in aching vocal work and jagged textures while boldly pushing toward the solace of self-preservation. And on Oh My God, Boniface presents a gloriously epic expression of affection, proving their profound gift for turning outpouring into poetry (sample lyric: “You’re the water in a swimming pool/Steal my breath in late October”).