True musical chemistry is elusive. It’s that almost-magical balance of discipline and freedom that lets you walk out onto a limb, sonically speaking, with full confidence that someone will be there to catch you if and when the bough breaks.

It’s a precious thing, and it explains why certain musicians choose to work with each other time and again. Take the Starling Effect as an example. The Vancouver rock band’s three core members—singer-guitarist John Lucas, drummer Michael Nathanson, and multi-instrumentalist Greg Williams—played together in a previous project, Stride Elementary. All three were also in the long-running space-rock combo Windows ’78, and before that John and Greg were members of noted dream-pop act Hinterland.

As Greg observes, “Playing in a band is all about trust. After having worked together for more than 15 years, Michael, John, and I have confidence in each other’s abilities to deliver within the scope of our role. I implicitly trust them to come up with excellent parts to help inspire my own playing. This creates a confident band that can focus on maximizing the potential of their creative synergies.”

This year, the Starling Effect had some unfinished business to take care of.

At the start of 2024, the band booked time with producer Felix Fung at Little Red Sounds in New Westminster, B.C., and laid down bed tracks (drums and bass) for four new songs. The band released two of those songs that April: the shoegaze-leaning rock of “A Strange Habit of Disappearing” and the lush, slow-build dream-pop of “Blueskiesgrey”, the latter of which Alienated in Vancouver described as “great music to zone out to”.

Then, as so often happens, life got in the way, and the two remaining songs were left unfinished. Until now. This past spring, the Starling Effect returned to the studio to complete tracking “Pile of Ash” and “Memory Palace”.

“The pause before returning to Little Red Sounds to finish ‘Memory Palace’ and ‘Pile of Ash’ was good for me because it really let me live with the songs and refine my guitar parts over time for maximum effect,” Greg recalls.

“Pile of Ash” is a bit of a departure for the Starling Effect, a relatively straight-ahead number that peels back some of the group’s usual hazy shoegazing layers to reveal just a hint of rock ’n’ roll swagger. The song started with a part created by bassist Alex Reed and grew organically from there.

“I was noodling around high up on the fretboard of the bass when I came up with the main chorus progression,” says Alex, who left the Starling Effect amicably in the fall of 2025. “I didn’t think it was anything special at first, but it caught someone’s ear—possibly Michael’s—and we started jamming on it.”

Michael concurs. “From the moment I first heard what Alex was playing, I absolutely loved it,” he reflects. “Not wanting to clutter up the feel, I started tapping out a solid floor tom/snare pulse which ultimately became the foundation for ‘Pile of Ash’.”

“Once Alex came up with the inspired, chordal, descending bass line, the rest of the music wrote itself,” says Greg. “I remember it all coming together effortlessly around that part.”

“Because the inspiration for ‘Pile of Ash’ struck us so quickly, I just grabbed an old set of lyrics that I had written years before for a previous band but never used,” John says. “They deal with a breakup that happened a long time ago. I have some emotional distance from them now, so I can actually have a little bit of fun with the words.”

With its time signature of 6/4 and its wordless, call-and response chorus, “Memory Palace” is a departure of a different kind.

The lyrics are based on an unpublished fantasy novel that John wrote several years ago. “It’s essentially about childhood and how memory creates reality,” he says. “The structure of the song reflects that theme. The third verse has the same words as the first, but, just as we can never remember events exactly as they happened, it’s not an exact double. It’s embellished with a vocal harmony and woozy synth textures.”

“The title is very evocative and while playing the song it is fun to imagine the goings-on in this ‘Memory Palace’ and what is archived in there,” Greg notes. “This kind of connection to a theme really influences how I develop my parts.”

”I’ve always loved songs in 3/4 and 6/4”, says Michael, “and the arrangement of ‘Memory Palace’ affords opportunities to create unique rhythmic interplay with Greg and John, and, in Felix’s words, ‘lyrical’ rhythmic passages within the underlying feel of the chorus.”

Unfinished business resolved at last, the Starling Effect is eager to release its newly finished songs into the wild.

“It feels great to have closed the loop on this batch of recordings,” says Greg. “We hope they resonate with our listeners and that they draw more people into the fold.”

THE STARLING EFFECT:

JOHN LUCAS: lead vocals, guitar
MICHAEL NATHANSON: drums
GREG WILLIAMS: keyboards, guitar, bass