Blowin’ Up (2026)

Tired of Throwin' Up & Growin' Up, Kiwi Jr. are finally Blowin' Up. Confronting the desperate neon of a guitar group approaching statesmen status on their fourth album, Kiwi screech sideways to make the last exit to Michigan, laying down 10 drivetime highlights daydreaming of a sweet spot between swift pain & lucrative settlement, trudging daylight through clerical quicksand & watching the tides rise up to meet our wheels.

Wintering at Detroit's HIGH BIAS Studios, our veteran "Juniors" take stock & make rock, punching the clock with Graham Walsh (Holy Fuck) behind the board & Nicolas Vernhes (Deerhunter, Silver Jews) fine-tuning the mix. Assembling a local posse for urgent tactical support, Kiwi recruit Detroit's real Big Three - Protomartyr, Stef Chura, Fred Thomas - and beam in additional moonlighters Margaux Bouchaudon of En Attendant Ana, & Kerri Maclellan of Alvvays.

Blowin' Up dissects topical turmoil and asks “who made this big mess?”, predicting on the title track “when detectives get here Monday morning, it’s our fingerprints on the scene.” Bricolaged together from greige 9-5s & bleary-eyed stagetimes, Kiwi file a report from the front, the nonstop Christmas-morning-coal mouthfeel of daily life in ‘25 smashburgered into a diamond-rich slurry: “Language arts on the way out…if you’ve anything clever to say you better say it now” (Landscape with Limousine).

A veritable Kiwipedia regurgitating the band’s diet of esoteric information, no part of modern life is left unvitamixed in the Blowin’ Up smoothie: the mother-daughter crimesolving duo of Photos of the Reenactment; relocation to the previously uncharted Hard Drive, Ontario (“it’s hard to leave home with your heart on a hard-drive”); & adolescent trips across the border to source Labatt 50 at the Canadian drinking age in textbook Kiwi detour Pure Michigan: “I’m losing perspective on the Ambassador Bridge; I’m 19 in Windsor and that’s Pure Michigan.”

‘68 Comebacking from two years of writing & touring in pre-season shape, toned & sleeveless, jumpsuits creaseless, Kiwi uncrunch their detuned aloofness into a newer, brighter consideration. The New-Wavey World Like Polly, written for Lemonhead’s muse Polly Noonan, draws a dividing line in the oft put-on slacker attitude: “I wanna live in a world like Polly and pretend it’s cool to pretend not to care.”

Rock City in the rearview, back in Toronto post-thaw, steam billowing from factories pressing this airtight LP4, Kiwi swing from the CN Tower picking choppers apart like pistachios: a Can-Con King Kong, four albums deep & playing just to play. Blowin’ Up is Kiwi Jr. at their most optimistic, earnest beyond their Nielsen rating age demographic: "I am on your side!” they repeat in Painting after Painting, and we believe them; old friends with new songs, Kiwi Jr. is on our side, and they're about to blow up.

Chopper (2022)

Smash cut to Kiwi Jr.’s third album, Chopper, overseen by trusted pilot Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs) on storied Sub Pop Records. Turning nocturnal with necks mock turtle, our Local Kiwi Jr. takes neon flight off the digital cliff - like The Monkees starring in Blade Runner; like Michael Mann directs Encino Man. Ten songs with synth shimmer, zen gongs with yard strimmer. The signs along the highway read “LESS BAR, MORE NOIR AHEAD.” Ah, those late summer, Joe Strummer, Home on the Range Rover Blues. 

There's a melancholy to all forms of flight, and the view out the Chopper is as hazy as it gets: mission-oriented, both stealth and self-realized. This album is decidedly (yet almost secretly) anti-patio-sunscreen-Beach Boys bachelor cruise sing-a-long. Sure, these songs let a little light through the blinds, but they sting insomnia, corrupt mayors, Kennedy Curses, sex tapes, and deer rifles. Chopper is the bird's eye view of the big event - a real nighttime character of oil stain, film grain, search light, night flight. It is muscular and fragile; loud yet quiet: both an observer and somehow the observed spectacle itself.

What was slack in the slacker phase, got tauter, with lacquer glaze. Slick gloss, rightened wrongs; murdered boss, promoted pawns. With Boeckner transmitting high-voltage shocks upon every reach for a familiar instrument, Kiwi Jr. expands the palette with string machine song, synthesizered oblong, and Dentyne Classic Menthol vocals from area soprano Dorothea Paas (US Girls, Badge Epoch Ensemble) like the missing piece all along.

Kiwi Jr. brings the Chopper to a new space, demilitarizing the technology just like flasks, aviators, and cargo shorts. Graceful in the air above, but when the Chopper lands, there's chaos on the ground.  Kiwi Jr. shout, “Look Out!” When it gets close, it'll blow the hat right off of your head.

Hold onto your hats, Babies.

Cooler Returns (2021)

Buildings burning in every direction; macabre unknowns in your friendly neighbour’s basement; undecided voters sharpening their pencils: under pressure we could call Kiwi Jr’s Cooler Returns “timely.” But what year is it, again? On their sophomoric smash-up released world-wide by Sub Pop Records, Kiwi Jr cycle through the recent zigs & looming zags of the new decade, squinting anew at New Year’s parties forgotten and under-investigated small town diner fires, piecing together low-stakes conspiracy theories on what’s coming down the pike in 2021. Put together like a thousand-piece puzzle, assembled in flow state through the first dull stretch of quarantine, sanitised singer shuffling to sanitised studio by streetcar, masked like it's the kind of work where getting recognized means getting killed, Cooler Returns materialises as a sprawling survey from the first few bites of the terrible twenties, an investigative exposé of recent history buried under the headlines & ancient kings buried under parking lots. 

Not so long since their debut Football Money in archaeological time, unending gray eons later in the dog years of quaran-time, spiritually antipodean Canadians Kiwi Jr return to disseminate this year's annual report to the shareholders, burying the incriminating numbers in the endless appendices of a longform narrative record, a 3,000 word tract for stakeholders to pore over. 

Cooler Returns - memories of Augusts past, unrepressed & transcribed fast - goes down easier thanks to meaningful changes enacted in 2019’s KiwiCares Pledge: delivering on a promise to transition from Crunchy to Smooth by 2021, the caveman chug of Football Money has been steamed & pressed with the purifying air of a saloon piano - operated with bow-tie untied - and a spring green side-salad of tentatively up-tempo organ taps & freshly fluted harmonica.

A chronically detuned spin of the dial through swivel-chair distractions & WFH daydreams, an immersive ctrl-tab deluge cycling through popular listicle distractions like the unentombing of Richard III, or the deja vu destruction of the Glasgow School of Art, Kiwi Jr sing this song to an indoor audience, crisscrossing canceled, every other prestige distraction source wrung dry, only songwriting remaining to deliver engrossing tales to the populace, just how I imagine it worked in the old days. Fixing loose ingredients into a sturdy whip, Kiwi jr beam in live from the 9-5, striding into 2021 with a mastered brainwave that comes equally from the back room of the record store as the penalty box. And how do we, left holding this box of deliberate entanglements, sign off to those as yet uninitiated, undecided, uncertain, unseen, absent return coordinates. Best Wishes, Warm Regards, Good Luck? Cooler Returns, Cooler Returns, C o o l e r  R e t u r n s !

Football Money (2019)

Circulated by MINT RECORDS, already recreated at high volume on stages across Canada, labeled "Delightful as $#!@" by NOW Magazine and "Naive enough to be charming" by Exclaim, Torontoís Kiwi Jr. presents FOOTBALL MONEY : a dispatch stitched out of fragments, a lustrous twelve-string paint-job unraveling ten booksmart tracks in under thirty minutes. A product of two years of labor, a monument to work-life balance, the record is not unattractively scarred by its circumstance : recorded by nightfall in dormant studios, friends and enemies drafted as backup singers and engineers, FOOTBALL MONEY untidily fuses the yin of work with the yang of life, chronicling a dual-existence, unkempt instrumentalists moonlighting as undercompensated administrators by the harsh fluorescent light of day, borne back ceaselessly into the Greater Toronto Area by night.

Built from the clay of the day-to-day - as attentive to the complexities of a sporting salary cap as to the mystery of love; to the burden of Toronto rent as the reality of ruin- itís a record of modern creation, lyrics text-wrapped in Excel spreadsheet cells, Rickenbackers detuned to the frequency of a blue-screen migraine. Kiwi kritiks delineate influences like sections of the cow - the rump: JANGLE; the loin: PUNK - and seem set on referring FOOTBALL MONEY to the criminal court with the Modern Lovers and the Kinks ccíd but ultimately unable to prove intent. But Kiwi Jr. conjure what we think about when we think about Patricia Highsmith paperbacks, Peel Session Comps, and pitchers of cheap domestic : FOOTBALL MONEY is a laser cold hit.