The Rural Alberta Advantage resurfaced after a five-year break around this time last year leading up to the release of their EP The Rise in late March. With founding member Amy Cole back behind the keyboard after stepping away from the band for 2017’s The Wild, the brief set of songs recalibrated the band’s DNA to make space between Nils Edenloff’s twanging guitar and Mangum-esque vocals and Paul Banwatt’s hectic drumming for Cole’s lighter touches that propelled the trio’s earlier records.
Following that EP, the band is set to hit the road again with a string of dates in the US planned out in the coming months, with Georgia Harmer supporting. To prep audiences for the tour, the band is sharing a new single called “Plague Dogs” which arrives alongside a visual of the group performing the tune at a November show in their hometown of Toronto at the Danforth Music Hall. “This song really came together live—we were in the process of mixing it when we finally got to perform it for people,” Banwatt shares. “We realized the live performance was feeling a lot heavier and edgier than the recording at that point, and people were into it. It really helped us figure out what the song should ultimately sound like.”
Regarding the track’s lyrics, Edenloff shares that the track title was a reference to Richard Adams’ novel of the same name, and how the story played into the early-pandemic time period in which he read it. “The song doesn’t end up following the events of the novel in any way, but it underscores the specific timeframe that we started to work on this song,” he says. “The feelings of dread, uncertainty, and isolation that I felt while reading the novel, along with the eerily similar feelings around early on in the pandemic are so tightly coupled with this song that it all feels like one for me.”
“The core of it has existed in a bunch of different forms over the last couple of years, and we even recorded some alternate versions which will absolutely never see the light of day,” Cole adds. “The ‘classic rock’ bridge comes from a totally different song we had also been working on, and I got a rare band argument win (me winning is rare, the arguments are not) by successfully convincing Paul and Nils to incorporate it into this song.”
Watch the Brittany Farhat–directed visual and find the band’s upcoming tour dates below.
