Tap any face to see why they're in the photo

Who shaped them

of Montreal

of Montreal

Since 1996 · United States

of Montreal formed around Kevin Barnes, who moved to Athens, Georgia and fell in with the same Elephant 6-affiliated circle of bedroom-recording musicians steeped in the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Kinks that also produced Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control. Their story

Full songs onSpotifyApple MusicYouTube
See them on the map

Press ▶︎ to play

Loading…

It really plays! Press the middle

Who they shaped

Nobody on the map lists them as an influence yet.

Behind them, left to right: Kate Bush, Neutral Milk Hotel, Arca, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Olivia Tremor Control, Patti Smith.

The bigger the face, the stronger the proof: they said it themselvesreporteda critic, or widely accepted

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? cover

Start here

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007)

Hear it onSpotifyApple MusicYouTube

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? channels a period of real personal crisis into bright, danceable electro-pop, the mismatch between the music's exuberance and the lyrics' darkness never fully resolving. "Gronlandic Edit" rides a buoyant synth hook under lyrics about depression and self-erasure, the tension between the two giving the song a genuine unease beneath its catchiness. Kevin Barnes's shift toward electronic production marked one of several dramatic reinventions across his catalog. It remains the album most responsible for widening of Montreal's audience beyond the Elephant 6 underground that produced him.

Sleeve notes

of Montreal

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? · 2007

of Montreal formed around Kevin Barnes, who moved to Athens, Georgia and fell in with the same Elephant 6-affiliated circle of bedroom-recording musicians steeped in the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Kinks that also produced Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control. Barnes's own influences have rotated dramatically by album — early psychedelic pop giving way to a Prince- and Bowie-inflected electro sound, then late-1960s rock, then contemporary EDM and electronic production — with Bowie, Prince, Kate Bush, and Patti Smith among the names he's named as shaping how he makes music generally.

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007) marked one of the most dramatic of those turns, channeling a period of personal crisis into brighter, more dance-oriented electronic-pop arrangements that sat in stark tension with the album's often bleak lyrical content. The record became one of the band's most widely praised and commercially significant releases, and its combination of surface exuberance and underlying darkness set the template for the persona-driven, genre-hopping approach Barnes has continued to pursue across the records that followed.

Since 1996 · United States

Played at

Elephant 6

Denver then Athens, Georgia · 1993–2000

On the bill

Kevin Barnes joined the collective later, in Athens, after it had already relocated there — not one of the original Ruston friends, but folded into the same circle once he arrived.

The whole scene