How did you spend your evenings during lockdown? Some people took up prodigious amounts of baking. Others caught up on TV shows they’d neglected or movies they’d missed. I trolled Bandcamp, doing everything I could to fill the void of nighttime DIY shows with discovery of new band after new band. I had a network of friends who did the same, and we’d exchange links to new favorites like hunting trophies.

One evening, a friend sent me the self-titled tape from a new Canadian project band knitting. The song “baby carrots” floored us with its bedroom pop candor: “I bought a bag of baby carrots/ And it reminded me of all the cigarettes/ I smoked for all the people that I’d never impress/ But baby carrots don’t give me any regrets,” followed by “But baby carrots never made me any friends.” The 90-second meditation of “baby carrots” felt like a little lightning strike in a bottle, a hint that there are still witty songwriters with a knack for the personal and the artistic. I saved the short album to my library and moved on.

Fortunately, knitting did not. As Montreal-based frontperson and songwriter Mischa Dempsey realized, their no-expectations experiment in songwriting and home production resonated with audiences of their prior band, Lonely Parade, which inspired them to build knitting into a proper band. knitting is now a rock quartet playing in the grunge and slacker sandboxes, anxious to share their debut album Some Kind Of Heaven this week via the longtime purveyor of strong Canadian indie Mint Records. Some Kind Of Heaven is personal yet sharp, tumultuous yet even-keeled, referential yet original. There’s undeniable skill in synthesizing familiar alt-rock sounds into something that satisfies beyond the sum of its parts.

Dempsey’s journey to leading a rock band started young. “We had a really good band program at my high school,” they say of their youth in Peterborough, Ontario, a satellite city about a 90-minute drive from Toronto. They took up trombone in the fifth grade and learned piano young, but they found rock music as a North Star when they saw the 2007 documentary Girls Rock. Young Dempsey grew resolute: They would go to Oregon and attend this legendary rock camp and study under legends like Carrie Brownstein in an atmosphere where masculinist standards could be suspended. That didn’t happen — Peterborough is comically far from Oregon — but they did make a home out of one of Ontario’s oldest and most established rock camps in their backyard, RC4G. Dempsey attended and eventually staffed this rock camp, building a network with other future rock stars at a young, pivotal age.

By 13, Dempsey was raring to tour and commit to the rock star life. “I discovered a band in the Daisy Rock Girl Guitars catalog called Care Bears On Fire. They had a sponsorship,” they explain. “I felt so behind because they were 14 and getting on support tours and I was maybe 13. I thought I was going to miss my shot.” This nagging sense of FOMO encouraged Dempsey to establish a three-piece indie punk outfit with fellow Peterborough friends called Lonely Parade. The trio shared songwriting duties and cut their teeth in the symbiotic Peterborough and Toronto DIY scenes before decamping for Montreal in 2017 in search of an affordable alternative to Toronto.

“I was angry when I was writing in Lonely Parade,” Dempsey recalls. As a young person coming into contact with the contradictions of the contemporary era, Lonely Parade’s three-piece arrangement suited garage-punk especially well at a time when singing, or yelling, through it was what you heard on college radio and at bar venues. Over five years, Lonely Parade grew into a touring outfit — albeit on a more humble DIY circuit compared to Dempsey’s beloved Care Bears On Fire — and closed on a high with The Pits, their well-regarded third LP. “The band ended up splitting because not everyone wanted to push it the same way I did, which is totally fair because it’s a terrible grind to commit oneself to,” they elaborate. In the year and a half prior to COVID lockdowns, Dempsey floated around the Montreal DIY scene, experimenting with a more mature writing style, but largely keeping it under wraps as they learned to navigate an unfamiliar city.

Where many people found the first major lockdown to be a stifling period, Dempsey took the opportunity to refine their songs and assemble them into a release as a way to communicate with friends in far-flung places about their evolving artistry. They eschewed the direct, accusatory songwriting style of Lonely Parade for something more subdued and reflective, one where they focused less on their frustrations with the world and more on their means of negotiating with them. “I was vibing with one-word band names at the time, and I was knitting a lot,” they say when explaining how these songs fell under the name “knitting.” The seven songs that came out of that homebound experiment, supported primarily by percussion built on a four-track and sampled throughout, made up the self-titled tape I found on Bandcamp all those years ago.

The tape primarily stayed within Dempsey’s network of folks who were grateful to see that someone from Lonely Parade was still making music. The songs touched a nerve in audiences: “Even now, people ask us to play ‘baby carrots’ and other stuff from that record, which feels nice because it was really genuine,” they say. As safe, in-person gigs popped up in Montreal, Dempsey slowly assembled a band in the latter half of 2021 and beginning of 2022: Drummer Andy Mulcair dreamed up a band with Dempsey when they reconnected at a gig, guitarist Sarah Harris joined when she moved from Newfoundland to start a degree in electroacoustics in Montreal, and Dempsey linked with Piper Curtis, already the bassist of Sunforger, through a former partner. With two guitars instead of one, plus the energy of live percussion, knitting leveled up, growing from a punchy bedroom pop solo act to a seismic quartet marrying slacker rock and grunge together with unusual precision.

knitting are part of a wave of Montreal bands coming to fruition after the COVID lockdowns hit the scene with particular force. “A lot has changed. When I first moved here, the cool stuff was happening in DIY spaces like Poisson Noir and La Plante that were like, 20-year-olds in industrial spaces who’d throw dingy DIY shows and sell $1 beers at the door. During the pandemic and for related reasons, those spaces shut down or changed hands and then shut down,” explains Dempsey. Relatedly, many Anglophone bands broke up or retired and left Montreal to find career opportunities outside of Quebec. Everything in Canada must serve both English- and French speakers, but in Quebec, there are particular policies in place to preserve the primacy of the French language, so people who are predominantly English-speaking can have trouble establishing a career in a city like Montreal.

Dempsey thought that moving to Montreal would help them fortify their own French language skills — their parents enrolled them in a French language immersion school at a very young age — but in a city with so many English speakers, especially in the heterogeneous DIY scene, that hasn’t really panned out. Amidst all this turmoil, though, young upstarts and DIY veterans have launched new projects, and newer promoters like Worst Dad Ever and KickDrum have helped cultivate a new generation of Montreal DIY. Pair that with a vibrant festival circuit that helps uplift Canadian bands across the country, like Pop Montreal in the band’s hometown, Lawnya Vawnya in St. John’s, or Sled Island in Calgary, and you have a rich environment for Canadian upstarts to get their name out there while applying for grants or apprenticeships that can be even more impactful.

It’s in this revitalized DIY scene where knitting experimented with the sounds and songs that would eventually comprise their debut full-length, Some Kind Of Heaven. With two guitars instead of one, Dempsey leans into a more immersive, stormy style of guitar layering, borrowing some textural elements from shoegaze, but maintaining a grunge-y structure that makes more room for their deliberate, gently delivered lyrics. It’s the right blend of soothing and tense, allowing for gradual or sudden push-pulls of intensity when needed. Some Kind Of Heaven is full of that, with guitars whirling into a minor frenzy while Dempsey’s voice maintains stoicism. It’s the perfect representation of presenting a calm demeanor while disentangling the messiness of young adulthood as it gets internally louder and louder. Grunge mainstays have an outsized role in knitting’s influenced-by list: playing a Halloween cover set as Nirvana (in the angel costumes seen in the “Heaven” video, no less) was formative for the band, plus they hit Olympia on tour during a collective Hole phase. More contemporary envelope-pushing rock bands are up there, too, like DIIV, Momma, and Wednesday. “Rock music IS awesome, actually. Sometimes, it feels kind of embarrassing to be a rock fan in 2024, but there’s a lot of great rock bands now,” Dempsey says.

“I do mostly write about realizations or conclusions that I’ve come to or use songs to figure out experiences that I have,” Dempsey explains. Some Kind Of Heaven is full of moments pulled from routine challenges and fraught moments. “I’ve been scolding myself with my dead name/ it’s hanging on with the ring of a catchphrase” off “Green” is one which touches both verbal and and unspeakable doubts while making clear their non-binary identity, to which they made reference on the self-titled tape’s closer “spitting on the sidewalk.” The video for “Spirit Gum” depicts the house hunt in an increasingly expensive city while the lyrics chart the closing of a relationship and sense of home: “The rug beneath my feet/ Came out from under me/ And now I’m down to one fork in a kind of divorce/ Without a clear procedure.” As referential as the lyrics get, Dempsey’s reticent to let them roar as loud as the guitars; the riffs articulate what’s otherwise challenging or painful to convey.

knitting are exciting on their own, but the east Canadian guitar rock scene feels like the sibling scene to Philadelphia’s comically bloated, but painfully exciting, DIY rock community. “There’s a vibe parallel between Philly and Montreal,” Dempsey says. “As I understand it, Philly is one of the less-expensive cities on the east coast, and Montreal is kind of like that. There’s room for creativity in a less-expensive city.” Philadelphia and Montreal both have strong proximity to bigger, more expensive cities with creative reputations — New York and Toronto, respectively — and both have DIY scenes that have grown beyond healthy into practically unavoidable networks for cultural production. knitting have performed in Philadelphia four times, all in different DIY spaces with a slew of rising favorites like art rock freaks ME N U and Julia’s War-affiliated slowcore band Ruth In The Bardo. They recently shared a stage in Toronto with longtime Philly favorites 22º Halo, and Piper mastered the latest offering from soft-slacker outfit Heatloaf. Montreal, Toronto, and Philadelphia’s DIY rock scenes orbit each other more and more with every passing year, sharing their gifts with each other’s fans and forming a post-lockdown network of DIY alt rock. They’re leveling up.

“Who am I supposed to be?” Dempsey asks on the particularly pointed “Family Tree.” They never reach a proper conclusion, but maybe it’s this: the person who spent their youth raised by a mother who called herself “the only punk in my rural high school” and a father who made driving mixtapes that switched between Beethoven and the Specials has found exactly who they’re supposed to be through knitting. Flanked by friends bulking up their writings onstage and a rejuvenated DIY scene that’s forging a network across national borders, Dempsey is in the right place at the right time. Some Kind Of Heaven is the proof.

Some Kind Of Heaven is out 9/6 on Mint. Pre-order it here.