Octoberman returns with Chutes, the band’s seventh full-length album, out August 27 on Ishmalia Records.
You find the long-running indie-folk collective in a reflective, stripped-back mood, produced by Jarrett Bartlett and Marc Morrissette, and engineered by Bartlett at Ottawa’s Little Bullhorn Studios.
You hear songs recorded live to two-inch tape, without click tracks or screens; the result is a loose, warm, and emotionally resonant album that embraces both imperfection and presence.
You encounter the opening line—“It’s hard to know just how to grow old”—and you feel the record preoccupied with aging, shifting relationships, and the inevitable churn of personal history.
You learn that “half of these songs were from old demo ideas found on a solid drive.” They’re third-party storytelling songs about complete strangers. The other half are newer and more introspective—capturing the idea of aging, endings, and new beginnings. A thread of curiosity and compassion unites the songs as they flow between perspectives.
You meet longtime bandmates Marc Morrissette (guitar, vocals, synth), Marshall Bureau (drums, vibraphone), Tavo Diez de Bonilla (bass, vocals), J.J. Ipsen (guitar), and Annelise Noronha (accordion, banjo, guitar, background vocals). The live-off-the-floor approach at Little Bullhorn was later complemented by overdubs in home studios across Ontario.
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Morrissette expresses, “I knew for Chutes that I wanted to take a DIY, live, and organic approach as much as possible.” The end result is a more spare and relaxed-sounding album, with new instrumentation ideas like accordion, banjo, and vibraphone that hadn’t shown up on Octoberman records previously.
You sense that understated warmth supporting songs that explore grief, memory, and resilience. Following the death of his mother, Morrissette found himself more attuned to impermanence and the fragile nature of stability: “Losing an ever-present person in my life made me more afraid of it happening again, especially as a father and husband. Overall, it’s like losing a part of yourself that never comes back.”
You place Chutes within seven albums and two EPs that have earned comparisons to a “sunnier Elliott Smith or Sparklehorse” and “Stephen Malkmus at his loosest.” You note music on shows like Grey’s Anatomy and stages shared with Julie Doiron, Mount Eerie, and Owen Pallett. With members now spread across Ontario after stints in Toronto and Vancouver, Chutes arrives not as a reinvention but as a quiet reaffirmation—an album that accepts change as a given and makes peace with it, one song at a time.
