On the night I’d asked Zoftig to play a fundraiser show for Arthur, lead singer Drake Stillie took me aside and asked me whether he ought to change the lyrics of “The Gun Song.” 

“The line is ‘I’ve still got a gun’,” he told me, “but I’m thinking of changing it to ‘I’ve still got a son’.”

I had to assure him, yes, he could say “gun,” we didn’t mind. It could hardly affect our image, I told him, when we had edited footage of multiple political assassinations into the visuals accompanying the bands. 

While I told him this, I had a fake severed hand stuffed into the back pocket of my overalls. Over the course of the night, we’d routinely toss it into the crowd for shits and giggles. I think there’s a photo out there from the Zoftig set of Drake using it to try and play the guitar in front of a blown-up projection of the diagram showing Saddam Hussein’s hiding spot.

That was a year ago. Then, the band seemed surprised to even be getting paid. Now they play packed rooms with Canadian indie legends like Holy Fuck!, have one of the strangest internet presences I’ve ever seen, and have released their first album, Tesco World Heritage Site.

It’s an impressive accomplishment for a band staffed by four full-time students. This isn’t to slight any other independent artists in any way, but one tends to expect a couple singles or maybe an EP from an emerging group, not a full-length debut, let alone one as confident and swaggering as this.

Because on a technical level, I think this is an excellent album. The production is crisp and on-point. The guitars are lush, the drums clear, and the vocals crucially not drowned out as they are on so many other debut albums. I listened to this record on douchebag headphones and it still sounded like garlic butter.

Between Tyler Martin and Khora Dyer’s production and Aiden Carney’s attentive mixing, Tesco World Heritage Site is a veritable confluence of local talent. And yet more than that, I think, what stands out is that despite it being very much a polished studio production, Tesco feels like what a Zoftig album needed to be.

You see, Zoftig have a vibe. I don’t mean this in the aggressively curated post-VSCO Instagrammarian acquired meaning of the word, but in the sense that they make any room in which they play buzz.

To watch them play live, you get the sense you’re watching something which could be important. If we lived in a city like Toronto, Van, or Montreal and not literally Peterborough, Ontario, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some writer calling them “the next big thing.”

Tesco World Heritage Site hums with this same sense of accomplishment. The hazy jam band quality of their live shows translates to a languidly tracked record, full of six-minute songs interspersed with left-in studio noise and compiled between seamless transitions.

It’s sonically overwhelming, and perhaps unkind to shorter attention spans, but then this album demands you sit with it and let it work you over. Album opener “It’s Okay” segues from a lilting guitar lick to a ballad with tints of reggae, into a strange, seemingly improvisational coda drowned in reverb and drum fills. 

At a tight two-minutes, with a rip-roaring guitar hook and catchy, repetitive verses, follow-up “Tesco Heritage Site” might be the closest the album has to a conventional pop tune, yet unlike the average single, it functions less as a vertical slice of its mother record than a showcase of just another mode the band can make their own. The song’s ad-libbed scream-barks seamlessly transition into the dreamy “Teethe,” which itself devolves into what sounds like a German industrial sample in its closing minutes.

“If you don’t want his money, baby, that’s fine just take my hand and I’ll make you poorer,” Stillie croons on “His Money,” a blissed-out love song that evokes shades of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” and which fits effortlessly into a pantheon of dirtbag melancholia embodied by the likes of Radiohead’s “High and Dry” and “Robbers” by The 1975.

It’s a brilliant line, at once pathetic, verging on scummy, yet achingly romantic. It’s the kind of line that makes you want to pore over liner notes, to scribble snippets thereof in the margins of your homework. Somewhere out there is a teenage girl with a Tumblr blog or a boy with an acoustic guitar searching for this very sentiment.

Of course, it’s by no means the only clever line on the project—listen closely past the reverbed legato and you’ll find no shortage of Tweetable turns of phrase. Is Stillie singing “It’s you and I alone,” or “And you won’t die alone,” on “Teethe”? The fuzzy psychedelia of the record both elevates this ambiguity and revels in it. 

Here the absence of liner notes or lyrics actually improves the experience, in my mind. Rather than succumb to the shallow temptation of interpretation, the listener is forced to confront their own experience of the record—somatic, emotional, contextual. What it “means,” in the grander scheme, feels less important than how one listens to it.

Each track brings its own subtle additions to the soundscape such that no one steals the show. Despite the lengths of its constituent tracks, the holistic sound of Tesco is so mercurial that one register never threatens to overstay its welcome. In effect, this is the highest praise you can give a record: there is definitively no filler.

The proggy opening minutes of “Baobab,” punctuated with string hits from violin fade into a lush chorus as the guitars kick in, ratcheting up until it becomes a wall of sound. Meanwhile, “Tele” bounces between punchy melodies and clever wordplay (“Tele gave me a list / all I had to do was circle “K”). 

“Secret Exit” features a duet between Stillie and keyboardist Sadye Middleton trading vocal duties on plucky, playful verses which build to layered, canon harmonies in the chorus. 

“I’ve been painting pictures of you / they look so good, but I can’t get your hair right,” Stillie bemoans, to which Middleton replies “I know.” 

“I’ve been writing songs about you / but I can’t get the words right” she sings back on the second verse. 

Penultimate track “Cherry” is perhaps the most driving song on the album, with a thumpy bassline that gradually picks up steam, honing the guitar licks and distorted choruses into something worthy of headbanging, or two-stepping in the pit to.

“The Gun Song” stands out as the most pared-down and (perhaps intentionally) unpolished song on the record, a semi-rambling six-minute suite which is at once a teasing, anticlimactic note on which to end and also a massive earworm.

The choral shots (“He’s got a gun!”) lend it a darkly comic, sing-along quality, while the incrementally-ratcheting distortion on Stillie’s voice makes you feel like you’re standing in a small room listening to the band play out on a shitty P.A. at the end of a long night.

As I listened to it on repeat, I recalled a clip from The Conan O’Brien Show where the late-night host went to visit Hunter S. Thompson on his compound because the writer refused to make a studio appearance. In the segment, Thompson smokes and drinks profusely while O’Brien attempts in vain to pose questions.

Before they go out to the shooting range, the host says, “The idea is, you’re going to instruct me in how to blow things to hell.”

“Well, no,” Thompson replies. “We’re going to do art.”

Tesco World Heritage Site is a shotgun-blast of a record, punchy, confident, and devastating at close range. In all my years living in Peterborough, it’s like nothing I’ve seen come out of this city or its music scene—not just a good record but one that made me stop, take my headphones off, and say aloud “Christ, this could really be something.”

I’ll refer here to my earlier comment about other cities. It’s not actually that Peterborough has never had any acts which threatened to be good, it’s just that most of them have already moved to Montreal.

Peterborough’s arts community is a daunting thing to break into—a loosely aligned group of largely financial interests run by the same handful of people for the last twenty years, with few people younger than 40 anywhere to be seen. Arts grants are a nightmare of favouritism and inside baseball, and a lot of “working artists” seem to view students as intrinsically beneath them, resulting in an inevitable turnover of up-and-comers every four or five years.

The result is a city in a crisis of artistic stagnation. Some of those in the “scene,” can’t see it for all their cloying to stay relevant. The fact is, they’ve been around too long.

I’ve been seeing the same shows put on by the same people at the same venues for years and years on end, and I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that at least some of them have given up trying. At the end of the day, competence is not the same thing as artistry. This city’s reputation as a Southern Ontario Mecca for the arts is out of step with the reality of the fabric of its music community. 

The few genuinely exciting, off-kilter, and experimental acts I follow struggle to draw an audience willing to engage with them against another all-male four-piece pop-punk band playing Faculty on the same night. Every town needs its bar bands, sure, but a scene cannot subsist off such bands alone. If you want good music and an overall healthy scene, you need to be willing to periodically step out of your comfort zone.

A lot of people I’ve talked to who used to work or play at The Spill have said that the biggest loss in the closure of a space like that, or Peter Robinson College’s Jolly Hangman, is—to paraphrase—the loss of a space to suck.

The Spill’s open booking policy meant that, unlike a lot of contemporary venues, you didn’t have to fork out $500 up front, which meant in turn it mattered less if people thought you sucked.

“A lot of great bands started off sucking,” my buddy Matt told me. “But if you never have a place to suck you never have the chance to get good.” 

I was at the first Zoftig show, back in the yesteryear of “whenever that was,” and while they didn’t suck then, the band I hear now—on this record, and live at the John—are night and day to what they were.

Talent compounds with confidence, and confidence compounds with repetition. It takes time, effort, and support for bands to mature in the way Zoftig have. This record only exists because the band crowdfunded the costs of recording it. It’s a product of the band, of course, but also of the scene that produced them. What is a band, after all, without people to play to? 

Zoftig are, to my mind, the first Peterborough music success story of the 2020s, and Tesco World Heritage Site is that success paying dividends. Not since the first time I heard King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard rip through the opening suite of I’m in Your Mind Fuzz on Live in San Francisco ‘16 has a record so instantly clicked for me.

This record is so stuffed to the brim with potential that the album art can’t even fit within the proper dimensions. It’s as legitimately exciting to me as a moment in Canadian independent music as The Unicorns’ debut, or the release of Apologies to the Queen Mary. I’m prepared to die on this hill, chips fall where they may.

Tesco is a prime example of what students and musicians can accomplish when people actually reward them for trying, and when places like Sadleir House provide a space for people to play original, challenging music and not just bar standards or acoustic singer songwriter fare. It’s already one of my most-played records of this year, because I’ve been listening to it back-to-front even outside the auspices of this review.

A band like Zoftig have every indication of being able to go the distance, but they’ll never be able to do it alone. Cynical though it might be to say, the thing that determines whether any act is “the next big thing” is never raw talent, but simply whether or not anybody cares. So if you’re going to waste your twenties being groupie to a band, why not pick one your kids might ever talk about? Who knows, maybe one day you’ll spin this record for them.

So if you’re looking for recommendations, here’s my advice: Go to the next Zoftig show. Stand at the front and clap loud. Sing along if you know the words. Bob your head if you don’t. Stop by the merch table on your way out. Buy this album on Bandcamp for more than $10. Once you’ve done that, here’s what you do.

Invite yourself over to your buddy’s place—the one who has the biggest, bassiest soundsystem. Crank the speakers as loud as you can without getting a noise complaint, take 10g of THC and put this on. Eat a whole bag of tortilla chips and seven-layer dip then lay down on the carpet and close your eyes.

I guarantee that by the time you’ve listened through you’ll want to do it all over again.

Evan Robins 20250929

Tesco World Heritage Site is streaming on all major platforms, and is available to purchase on Bandcamp for the price of your choosing.