Kestrels

Darla Records

When you think of the kind of musician who quotes Jame Joyce’s Ulysses on the regular, you’re probably picturing some kind of nerd-rock impresario in a pork pie hat and glasses going hard on a squeezebox. Chad Peck is none of those things — although he probably wouldn’t knock you if you threw out the word “nerd.”

A high school English teacher from the wilds of Canada with equal love in his heart for Stephen Dedalus, the Beach Boys, and oceans of fuzz, the frontman of shoegaze rock outfit Kestrels is primed to drop his most ambitious record yet, Better Wonder, on Darla Records on 14 February 2025. It’s a nighttime delirium of an album that wrestles with love, loss, and the culmination of a life in pursuit — of what, Peck’s still not sure. “‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake’ is what Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses,” he says. “That rings incredibly true here.”

The Kestrels project has been nesting in Peck’s mind since he was a kid in Nova Scotia, watching in awe as local punk bands released grungy cassette tapes to the young masses. While he didn’t enter the fray then, he did spent hours practicing guitar at his kitchen table, and lived on a steady diet of the Beach Boys, Ash, Nirvana, and the Smashing Pumpkins. After studying English and psychology in college, Peck finally took the plunge into the music scene in 2005, when he used a small grant to start his own label, Noyes Records — mostly to put out his own music (with a shouty, post-punk affair called the Medium Mood) and hawk local bands. “Those early songs were big into glibness — very impressionistic and very anti-message,” he says. “Like a primal scream, but like a literary arts primal scream.”

Although he was big on the obfuscation that punk and fuzz afforded, Peck was always into melody — bands like Nirvana and the Beach Boys who could trim thickets of sound into something divine. The first iteration of Kestrels, which formed in 2008, sought to emulate that formula, releasing their landmark album, A Ghost History, in 2012 on Sonic Unyon. “Our grand ambitions were probably a bit beyond our talents,” Peck says now. “But that was a cool record.” That album saw them touring the states and the U.K. for the first time, and although the band was poor and struggling, it gave them a taste of what was to come.

Kestrels’ self-titled release dropped in 2016. A tense look at a relationship on the outs, the record found them opening for Dinosaur Jr. and Ash, a fast-track they blazed down until that version of the band started falling apart in 2016. 2020’s Dream or Don’t Dream, Peck’s first on Darla Records, was almost a solo effort — although it featured J. Mascis, whom the musician became friends with after opening for Dinosaur Jr. at a bike shop in 2016. Fittingly, long-time Dino collaborator John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Alvvays, Kurt Vile, Cyndi Lauper) and mastering engineer Greg Calbi (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Television, Blondie) also lent a hand.

“I really appreciate what he does. I really like his taste,” Agnello says. “The kind of music he makes really kind of resonates with me. He can do all those kinds of sub-genre, stylistic things, and he’s such an excellent musician.” Peck took that album out on the road in 2021, opening for Bob Mould. Angello also worked on Better Wonder, which he sees as an evolution for Peck. “He’s gotten more creative on this record,” Agnello says. “It’s is pretty epic.” The lineup this time around features bassist Jim MacAlpine (Weird Nightmare) and drummer Michael Catano (North of America), who also played on Dream.

Peck started working on the songs that would become Kestrels’ fifth album almost a decade ago; half of the tracks came from a scrapped solo album. He began composing in earnest, though, in the spring of 2021, secreted away in his house in the country. “It’s a nighttime record riddled with anxiety written during a weird time,” he says. “I had lived alone in the woods most of my adult life and I loved that lifestyle in a lot of ways. But during that time period there was so much change and tumult and those feelings of insanity at three in the morning. I was trying to capture it in a murky, uncomfortable sound.”

“I made specific sonic choices to reflect that conceptual time of night, including mixing almost entirely analog with Agnello,” he adds. “It was my attempt to take the familiar and make it unfamiliar and new.”

The result is a woozy, disorienting suite of tracks, like finding a secret station between channels on a late-night drive. Take album-opener “Lilys,” which barnstorms in on a sea of percussion and swirling guitars as the protagonist wrestles with the concept of holding on to someone without letting them know they’re clinging. “It’s a treatise on how two incompatible ideas can coexist to make something work,” Peck says. (Alex Edkins from Weird Nightmare/Metz sings on that track — in fact, he begged Peck for the chance.) “Dream of You in Black” skulks in next, a synthed-out Robert Smith-style love song to a fictional goth girl. “It’s about the anxieties of waiting to see how a relationship plays out and the machine for fictions your brain can become in those situations,” Peck says. Next, “Float Alone” taps into Peck’s love for Dinosaur Jr., a very Nineties washed-out song with ripping guitars and big open chords put through old flangers. “It puts the ‘self’ in self-fulfilling prophecies,” Peck quips.

And then there’s the gorgeous, lush interlude “A Thousand Bare Diamonds,” titled after a bit of Magnetic Poetry written by Peck’s partner, Norma MacDonald, who also sings on the album. That tiny track serves as a reprise before we sail into “Sleepless,” which sees Peck merging his love of My Bloody Valentine with Brian Wilson — see instrumental motifs ala Pet Sounds amid waves of sound. “This song has a lot going on musically — listen closely,” he says. “Lyrically it’s pretty straightforward: I am losing it a little bit in quiet and private ways.”

“It Would” also taps into Peck’s Beach Boys adoration, pulling chords from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and injecting them with a heavy dose of late-Eighties indie rock. For this track, he painted his studio black to really sink into the corners of the song “It was a weird time!” he says, laughing. “Those lyrics, ‘Escaping inside,’ ’Show your darkness to me’ — that’s a good summation of how I was feeling at the time.” “Sunflower” blooms out of the darkness next, boasting five-part harmonies and acting as a break from the gloom — before we’re tossed back into the unknown with “Free Forever.” “This song is the weird mirror image of ‘Dream of You in Black,’ Peck says. “The uncertainty harnessed.”

The jagged “Nightlife” is perhaps the hardest-edge track on the record. And with good reason; it’s based on a 2020 Canadian mass shooting in which Peck lost people he loved. “I think of this now as my ‘fuck you’ to the desire to order and narrativize everything for our own comforts,” he says. “Sometimes horror happens and its echoes don’t follow easy paths.” “Interstellar” continues in that chaotic vein, a blur of a song composed on a wonky guitar Peck’s friend built for him. “There’s a real energy in the song that underpins the unsettling feelings in the track,” he says.

Joyce comes in swinging with the almost gentle “Nausicaa,” named for a chapter in Ulysses in which twilight gathers as the day winds down. “It’s about loneliness, history, and love,” Peck says. Blending 12-string guitars, synths, and vocals from Alex Gehring (Ringo Deathstarr) the song finds Peck’s psyche laid bare. “I read something once about how identity is actually found in the tension between who you are and who you want to be, which makes a lot of sense to me,” he says.

“Total Bummer” brings us back to the beginning in a sense, answering the question in opener “Lilys” — “Will you meet me alone?” — with the statement: “Meet me in the dark.” The night has been long, but it’s not over — and that’s not necessarily bad. Give into the gloom.
– Brenna Ehrlich