When: 7pm on Saturday 2 December 2023
Where: YES Basement, 38 Charles Street, Manchester, M1 7DB

PLEASE NOTE: All tickets for this show have already gone! Watch this space for details of future Rural Alberta Advantage shows in Manchester.

PLEASE ALSO NOTE: The early show times: doors open at 7pm, Zoon are on at 7.30pm and The Rural Alberta Advantage at 8.30pm (with a 10pm curfew).

We’re excited to welcome The Rural Alberta Advantage back to Manchester!

With the seismic shifts that have rolled out across the world over the past couple of years, The Rural Alberta Advantage (The RAA) has embarked on a distinctly divergent course for releasing their recent new music. An ongoing series of new songs and The Rise EP have been shared over the past couple of years with accompanying live shows across North America to support each release.

The Rise & The Fall, the fifth full-length album from the trio, will follow on 6 October via Paper Bag/Saddle Creek Records. Its release is preceded by Conductors, a rousing track dedicated to the universal question of why we run from the things we love.

The RAA’s most recent single Plague Dogs was workshopped live over the band’s sold out Canadian tour through autumn before returning home to record, and follows their continued efforts to record and release new music in real time. The song’s accompanying video features live performance footage from the band’s sold out hometown show at Danforth Music Hall in Toronto.

The new single follows last year’s six-song collection The Rise EP, which featured the single CANDU and garnered praise from Stereogum, Under the Radar, CBC Music, Exclaim, amongst others. 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 mum’s uncle worked up in Uranium City, Saskatchewan in the late 70s/early 80s, when it was a small but very active mining settlement,’ notes Nils. ‘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 vandalised. 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.’

The RAA’s music connects us to untold stories and an unpacked history we all have a part in owning, reflecting on, learning from and possibly seeing from a different vantage point: the overview effect. The trio continue to bring their thundering drums, hammered keys, furious acoustics and crystalline harmonies back to the fans, as they continue to road test new music in the works.

Tour support comes from Zoon. Zoon created Bleached Wavves with extremely limited, often broken gear. They worked through frustrating, lengthy delays and yet managed to reverse engineer a masterpiece of a debut. With sophomore album, Bekka Ma’iingan (Bay-ka Mo-Een-Gan), a broad spectrum of possibilities, lush orchestration, resources, collaborators and friends all supported the process.

Bleached Wavves provoked us to face many difficult questions and reckon with a deeply uncomfortable and painful history. Bekka Ma’iingan continues to explore their Indigenous and life experience, and while still clutching to the unresolved, it moves us more softly and sweepingly towards acceptance.

Buy tickets now. 

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