La Sécurité steps back from post-punk label with new album 'Bingo!'

Montreal rock band La Sécurité is rejecting the post-punk label that has defined much of their sound. The five-piece quintet, performing at Quebec City's Festival d'été de Québec this week, will premiere new songs from their album Bingo!, released last month.

"I'm already tired of post-punk," said Félix Bélisle, the band's bassist, drummer, and co-producer of the album. "It's been everywhere for a while now. All the bands sound the same." Éliane Viens, who writes lyrics and sings alongside playing keyboards, added: "It's become a formula. Kind of easy, like when there was the big normcore wave for a bit, the '70s revival, etc."

The band's influences range wider than the post-punk tag suggests. Laurence-Anne, on guitar and vocals, is a big Cocteau Twins fan. Mélissa Di Menna and Kenny David Smith draw from Devo. Félix loves LCD Soundsystem's dance energy more than post-punk's heaviness. "Our sound is kind of an amalgam of everyone's tastes," he said, pushing back against the label: "What we do is pop."

Bingo! showcases this range. Opening track Snack City is tense and fast. Deny follows with a dancefloor energy closer to James Murphy's work. Princesse grooves mysteriously. Nah Nah is dynamic, sung by Laurence-Anne. The arborescence of La Sécurité's rock has expanded, audibly.

Eliane has been drawing inspiration lately not from music but from dance and choreography biographies, thinking about performance intention and spontaneity on stage. "I'm concentrating more on the concert, the performance in front of an audience, the intention behind it," she explained. "My influences these days aren't musical, more poetry and these stories of choreographers' and dancers' lives. It resonates—their way of seeing things, the idea of letting yourself go in the present moment, in improvisation and spontaneity."