Maritime-expats-turned-Montrealers Fireball Kid boil down the wooden creaks and murmurs which haunt the cabins, camps, and kitchen parties of desolate coastal upbringings into a wistful indie rock potion. After their audacious party-pop debut record Emotional Bros Hotline, they followed up with patchwork synth-pop epic Gas Station. Now, their upcoming LP Deer Path Turn To A Shortcut pivots from their foundational raucous pop sound to a textured, acoustic world locked in a folky summer dusk. Fireball Kid dig their heels into all the joy and heartbreak of partying, haunted port city hillsides, and family curses, and stand waist deep amidst their own ongoing ghost story with a lantern in one hand and a tall cold one in another.

This record was a long time coming for me. I’ve been writing about partying hard for almost as long and hard as I’ve been partying. But there’s a way the hangovers and hangups of your

predecessors echo into your own life and mix with your own, and I think there’s a lot of sad, ghostly magic there. Where I’m from on the east coast of Canada you hear as many stories about getting fucked up in a shed (awesome) as you do about your friends buddy who ate it and met his maker drunk driving his ATV, and no matter which of these two types of story is being told the same misty-eyed, half-in-the-bag reverence is used. There’s a lot of death and strangeness mixed into partying that we don’t always want to look directly at, but that doesn’t mean we should stop celebrating. Everybody is just kind of soldering on with a few memories of dead friends flickering into their mind while you share a smoke with them. It’s hard and it’s beautiful. We’re all following roughly defined desire lines through the woods! I think all the heart and humanity that’s ever existed in the world is spilling out of us while we’re young, getting fucked up in a dirt pit or something, fist fighting and falling over, and on this record I wanted to sit with that and let the smoke from the bonfire wash over me.

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