THE BARR BROTHERS AND LES FILLES ILLIGHADAD

For the first time, the Montreal outfit’s three members—namesake siblings Brad and Andrew Barr, harpist Sarah Pagé—went empty-handed into the studio. Improvisations that lasted hours at a time, with grooves inspired by India, West Africa and 80s. Then the band took that racket and distilled it into 11 songs. At times the sound’s all twinkling, the score for a lost John Hughes film; at other times it’s whetted, searching, like the stuff of Lhasa de Sela or Led Zeppelin’s III. It’s this tension, this dither, that lives at the centre of Queens of the Breakers. The sound of a band still playing, even occasionally reimagining, their rock’n’roll.