The Rural Alberta Advantage are back with two songs, “CANDU” and “AB Bride,” their first new material since 2017’s The Wild. Both tracks find the Canadian trio in top form, bashing and rootsy and earnest. Per a press release, the band has plans to release a series of new songs and EPs over the course of this year as they’re written and recorded.

Here’s Nils Edenloff on “CANDU”:

‘CANDU’ is a rustic, anthemic reply to a once-booming Northern settlement that was abruptly forgotten and the band’s lament on the common connections that emerge when you’ve unknowingly tied your hopes to a sinking ship. My mom’s uncle worked up in Uranium City, Saskatchewan in the late 70s/early 80s, when it was a small but very active mining settlement.

We went to visit and it was the first time I was ever on a plane – as a young kid then, I’m not sure if the pictures in my mind now are real or just something from a dream. Candu was the local high school and only open for a couple of years while the town was booming; it was abandoned like everything else after the mines abruptly closed in the early 80s leaving most families stranded without work, and now sits completely vandalized. Growing up in a mining town myself, it’s hard not to think about who or what would have remained for me if the jobs all suddenly dried up, and where my friends and I would have ended up.

And here’s Paul Banwatt on the track:

When Nils said he was writing a song called ‘CANDU’ about Uranium City, it made me think of my Dad. He spent decades working as an engineer helping design the CANDU nuclear reactors. I remember the uranium fuel rod bundle display that was at my dad’s work. What happened to the people in Uranium City is really tragic, but I didn’t know about it until Nils wrote these lyrics. So the song also makes me think about all the different and hidden ways people across Canada are connected.

These two songs also mark the in-studio return of keyboardist and vocalist Amy Cole, who left the group in 2016 before they recorded The Wilds but rejoined the RAA on tour starting in 2018. Listen to “CANDU” and “AB Bride” out below.

“CANDU” & “AB Bride” is out now via Saddle Creek/Paper Bag Records.