Kevin Drew's New Solo Album 'Aging'

Broken Social Scene's co-founder and front man Kevin Drew is thrilled to release his most vulnerable, minimal solo album to date - Aging - available digitally today via Arts & Crafts. Aging's sonic profile sits in a similar place as beloved Broken Social Scene songs like “Lover's Spit,” “Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” and “The Sweetest Kill” – beautifully dark, richly melodic, and tinted with shades of melancholy and longing.  

With the album's digital release, Drew has shared the video for the beautiful album track “Awful Lightning.” The video, including select snippets shot by Drew and edited entirely himself, takes viewers on a journey of human life through quick glimpses into personal artifacts, emotions, and settings recognizable to all.  

Where other Kevin Drew songs throughout his vast and incredible catalog - both with BSS and as a solo artist - lean into the exuberant fist-pump of being alive, Aging is an album best played at the end of the night; a collection for the stragglers left when the bar is about to close; a serenade for those who are coming down; songs that are quietly sad but ultimately ruminative  and comforting.  

Influenced by the passing of friends and mentors, as well as the health scares of friends and family, Aging brings together songs written over a decade marked by the signifiers of midlife – love, loss, and illness – all while wrestling with the hard truths of aging: How do you deal with the blunt-force impact of loss? What does it mean to look and feel different than you did before? 

Aging was the inevitable title of Drew's meditative new record – because he was living everything that comes with it. The themes that have preoccupied much of Drew's two-decades-long career are still present – the power of love, resisting apathy, the pursuit of connection – but the subject matter once exclaimed with the youthful fervor of a wide-eyed idealist now carries the weight of someone trying to make sense of the world in the throes of grief.

The record finds the typically declarative Drew asking more questions than ever; late-night ruminations make up the beating heart of Aging.  Even the most hopeful songs on the album sound less like a diagnosis of the times than a distressed recognition – the voice of someone who has imparted advice to people for years accepting that they may not have listened. 

There are times when it's hard to know whether Drew is singing these songs to someone else or to himself. So much of the record is expressed outwardly to an audience – but given the sadness and loss at the core of the album, it's possible these songs have become mantras for himself. 

When he sings “I think you're gonna get better / I think you'll be back on your feet soon” on the closing track, it's as likely that he's providing comfort to the listener as much as to himself.  Indeed, therein lies the humility and vulnerability of Aging – an artist that has spent 20 years making empowering music and asking audiences to take care of each other is using the very same medium to take care of himself.

In addition to the release of Aging, Drew has compiled a collection of self-portraits and free verse “puke poems” into a 75-page book titled Towards Everything. The book is available to purchase now. 

Photo credit: Richard Briant

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