Music

When one thinks of the Pacific Northwest, many cultural signifiers and pieces of aesthetic shorthand spring to mind: Hiking, good weed, Birkenstocks, unmanageable housing costs … the list goes on! But the West Coast wouldn’t be the West Coast without surfy, laid-back tunes — and so to any one of their three-million-odd listeners, few things epitomize the coastal lifestyle more than Vancouver-based indie band Peach Pit.

The jangly, fuzzed-out rockers skyrocketed to fame with their 2016 debut, Sweet FA, which found a home amongst a generation of teenage tumblr users to soundtrack countless honey-yellow summers. Throughout the years, their music has grown with them — and their latest album, From 2 to 3, is a heartfelt trip through sunny days and yearning nights that sums up the longing and rebirth of the pandemic era with irresistible candor.

To many young Vancouverites, Peach Pit are more than a local band that made it big; they’re hometown heroes who have come to define a lot of what people love about the city. They’d never admit this themselves, though — when I suggest this idea to singer-guitarist Neil Smith in our phone conversation, he laughs it off with self-conscious charm. “Well, I don’t know if that’s necessarily true — I mean, the coolest thing about Vancouver’s scene is that there are so many DIY elements to the music here,” he says, before offering a glowing endorsement of local record label Kingfisher Bluez (Peach Pit play a much-beloved charity show with the label every Christmas).

And he’s right _ Peach Pit are only one part of the vibrant, diverse tapestry that makes up Vancouver’s inimitable music scene. But no one in the city could possibly deny that there’s something special about their work. When I was a college student fresh off my first flight to Vancouver, you couldn’t get through a conversation about an upcoming event in the local scene without hearing excited whispers about whether the Peach Pit guys would be there. If you happened to see them hanging out at a small-venue show, congratulations — that grainy iPhone video you managed to snap of them would make you the coolest person in your residence hall tomorrow.

Their music, which defined itself through an unpretentious, self-effacing ethos and tongue-in-cheek wit, came to define a rising aesthetic trend in and of itself — dubbed normcore, the distinctly 2010s sensibility was defined by a rejection of extravagance and an embracing of the average. Peach Pit, with their scruffy ’staches and perpetual collared shirts, look like the four nicest guys at your local house party — and that’s kind of the whole point. Paradoxically, they’re the most exceptional average guys in town.

Peach Pit are basically the definitive sound of beach days, twilight drives, house parties and road trips — even their sadder songs were often written to encapsulate the aftermath of a wild night. But, for Smith, the years have brought forth personal growth as well as musical.

“I found out that I wasn’t actually an extrovert like four years ago, when I quit drinking,” Smith says. “It’s weird. Your perspective changes on things.”

“Before I quit drinking, I was really afraid that, once I quit, I wouldn’t have those kinds of experiences that I write about anymore, and I wouldn’t be as good of a songwriter because I wouldn’t be as miserable, I guess. Which obviously just like isn’t true. Anything you do positively for yourself is only going to impact your writing positively as well.”

And it’s not just Smith — the whole band has grown up. “We used to all live together in a house, and now, everybody has their partners they live with, people are getting married,” he says.

In From 2 to 3, this growth is obvious — their surfy tunes and playful licks have been injected with a world-weariness and a confidence that’s entirely new.

“We’re older than we were seven years ago,” Smith says. “Where I’m at right now is just the natural swing of things.”