Spectres

Spectres are a Vancouver post-punk band whose records run from stark anarcho-punk to bright, melodic new wave. They began around 2005 as a studio project in a small farming community on Vancouver Island, where high school friends Brian Sven Gustavson and Steve Hanker had both landed back home in their early twenties. Gustavson sang and played bass. Hanker played guitar and drums.

Gustavson had come up on crust, Oi! and street punk, with no local shop or scene to show him anything darker. A website, deathrock.com, led him to Crisis, Christian Death and Southern Death Cult, and he heard the same shadow in British anarcho-punk bands like The Mob, Crass and Zounds. Crisis mattered most. The band name simply came to him. Years later, back in the same town, a neighbour’s father mentioned he had played in a 1960s pop group called the Spectres too.

The pair mailed out demos, and about a year later Whisper in Darkness offered a single. That forced a real band into being. Gustavson recruited Zach Batalden, a friend since the two met swapping messages on Napster in ninth grade, who owned a guitar but barely played it and had to work up his chops. Nathan Szilagyi took bass and Heather Szilagyi took drums. ‘Cold War’, recorded by Jesse Gander in December 2006, came out as a 7-inch in 2007 with ‘Message From Above’ on the flip. Heather Szilagyi soon left and Steve Gerencer took over on drums for ‘Visions of a New World’, issued in 2008. Hanker quit after a spring 2008 tour and Tyler Pilling replaced him on guitar, though Hanker and Gustavson kept playing together in Hidden Faces and Saigon Children.

Vancouver’s DIY punk scene at that point meant crust, grindcore and hardcore, and for about five years Spectres were the odd act on the bill, booking their own shows and paying for everything themselves. Audiences in Portland took to them before their own city did. Batalden also helped start the Distort Vancouver festival. Gustavson later described the band’s first West Coast tour as ‘inebriate performance art’.

Sessions for the first album began with Felix Fung at Little Red Sounds in January 2009. Last Days arrived in 2010, on Whisper in Darkness in North America and Sabotage and New Dark Age in Europe, alongside a split single with Portland’s Arctic Flowers. A planned single, ‘Decline and Fall’, was shelved. The second album was announced as Strange Weather and came out in November 2012 as Nothing to Nowhere, a vinyl-only release on Germany’s Sabotage, with the rough edges of the debut sanded down in favour of melody. European dates built a following overseas. The first time they played Leipzig, in a warehouse complex packed with bands, crust punks lit a bonfire in the street and the neighbours came out to drink with them.

Gerencer left in 2013 and the search for a drummer stalled the band for two years. Hanker returned to fill in, but an attempt to record four new songs with him failed. Mitch Allen, then also playing in Pura Manía, finally settled the question. Utopia was recorded with Fung between November 2014 and February 2015, then sat for months after the pressing plant suffered a major breakdown. It appeared in spring 2016 on Sabotage in Europe and Deranged in North America, eight songs of lusher, more atmospheric guitar work with Gustavson singing higher than he ever had.

In the summer of 2018 Spectres signed a five-album deal with Toronto’s Artoffact Records, which issued remastered CD editions of all three albums that October, the first time any of them had appeared on the format. Pilling and Nathan Szilagyi left midway through the writing of the next record. Guitarist Adam Mitchell and bassist Jason Renix arrived, and songs the band had given up on came back to life. ‘The Head and the Heart’ had been built on a Pilling riff and stuck for years. ‘Along the Waterfront’ had a chorus riff Batalden could never place. ‘The Call’ was written two weeks before the band entered the studio, after ‘Provincial Wake’ and ‘Northern Towns’ were pulled for their own 7-inch on Sabotage in October 2019.

Nostalgia, produced by Jason Corbett of ACTORS at Jacknife Sound, was released on March 13, 2020, midway through a US West Coast tour and just as the pandemic closed everything down. ‘Years of Lead’ tucked a reference to Richey Edwards into a song about North America’s political divide, and ‘Along the Waterfront’ nodded to Curt Smith. Reviewers reached for New Order and The Chameleons. Batalden was blunt about the aim: people should be able to dance to it.

Lockdown sent the band inward. Gustavson learned recording software and began demoing songs alone, playing every part. Hindsight, released November 5, 2021, gathered the out-of-print singles, three live recordings from the Los Angeles night Part-Time Punks and two new songs, ‘To the Victor’ and ‘Tell Me’, the latter cut with Jesse Gander, who had recorded ‘Cold War’ fifteen years earlier. Wayne Moreheart directed a stark monochrome video for ‘Tell Me’, and Stereogum heard deep New Order in it. Gustavson himself considered the record a collection of singles and rarities more than a proper album.

Beneath the melodies, Gustavson’s lyrics keep returning to history and to home. He spent his early life in Vancouver Island resource towns and watched the 1980s recession and the decline of the mills and the fishing fleet hollow them out. Anarcho-punk taught him those industries were ruining the environment, and he has never pretended that made the loss any smaller for the people who lived it. The closed mill and run-dry fishing fleet of ‘Northern Towns’ and the union hall of ‘Provincial Wake’ sit close to that history.

Presence followed on March 15, 2024, the band’s fifth studio album, with different members steering different songs. Gustavson wrote ‘AM Gold’, Mitchell wrote ‘Dominion’, and ‘Chain Reaction’ reached back to the Rikk Agnew and Adolescents records that shaped the early band. A standalone single, ‘Are You There’, followed on April 26, 2024. Asked what he wanted the album to do for the world, Gustavson said nothing at all. Spectres will have done their work, he said, if some kid finds one of their records in a used bin twenty years from now and it hits them.

-Robert Williston

Lineup as of Presence:

Brian Gustavson: vocals

Zach Batalden: guitar

Adam Mitchell: guitar

Jason Renix: bass

Mitch Allen: drums