Vancouver band Hillsboro finds its groove on new album

Vancouver band Hillsboro has arrived at a fully realized sonic identity with A Party in Your Name, its fifth studio album — and the first to land with widespread acclaim and packed shows across Canada.

The opening track HotGirlTM sets the tone: atmospheric guitars and screaming violin layered over a leaden kick drum, with Nima Walker's plaintive lead vocals landing on top, asking for attention from someone clearly not listening. By song's end, the wall of sound reduces to a whisper. It's awesomely dramatic, and a perfect snapshot of why this group is selling out venues nationwide.

The sound occupies the precise intersection where '90s emo meets '80s shoegaze — a space Hillsboro has been building toward since forming in 2019. "We started seven years ago with a specific intent to play slo-core emo really loud in basements to blow people's heads off," said Walker. "It was fun, so we put out the first record and then COVID stopped everything. That turned out to be good for the band, as we had a few years of listening to records and writing new songs in our basements."

That material formed the body of their 2023 self-titled debut. The band's personal lives provided the raw material for the new record. "Then pretty much everyone's personal lives fell apart and you can hear it in the writing," Walker said. "We've all experienced the hard things that come with being in your 20s amplified through the lens of a global pandemic. In the end, we always came back to the band as something like a family taking care of one another."

The band — Walker (lead vocals), Samuel Wells (lead guitar), Oliver Hollingshead (drums), Layten Kramer (bass), and Dexter Hodgins (violin) — worked with Victoria producer Colin Stewart, whose credits include Black Mountain, Destroyer, Yukon Blonde, and Dan Mangan. Mastering engineer Elisa Pansaeng, a Juno winner whose work includes Lights and Said the Whale, handled the final mix. This is her second Hillsboro album.

"Our tastes have grown with each release and the time in between them, but now I think we are capturing exactly where we wanted to be now," said Walker. "Our new bassist Layten has kind of been Colin's mentee for the past few years and he introduced us and Colin gave us some free studio time in his basement. After a week, he suggested we work together."

The band released a 13-minute mini-film for the album, directed by Kit Baronas. Walker credits DIY ethos and real friendships for such collaborations: "For us, it's important in everything we do that the people we work with are a vital part of the creative process. Using ours, and our friends', capacity to do what we do is the right thing at the moment. I'm not saying that we'll be indie forever, but we are being very deliberate about how we want to go forward so we can be doing this for a long time."

Having just wrapped a successful tour, the band hopes to continue hitting the road. The name Hillsboro, Oregon, came about during a casual band-naming session on Google Maps — they felt it was the kind of name a band they loved at 16 would have had. Hillsboro plays the Khatsahlano Street Party on July 11.