Homeshake

HOMESHAKE — the long-running solo project of Toronto-based musician Peter Sagar — announces his second album of 2024, Horsie, out June 28th via SHHOAMKEE, and shares the lead single, “Nothing 2 See.” Following March’s CD Wallet, Horsie was written and recorded at his home studio in Toronto as it explores Sagar’s complicated feelings about returning to live performance. Deepening his relationship to loneliness and anxiety, the record examines those themes in the context of touring and being on the road, which he’ll do this fall with a massive North American headline run on sale now.

While it marks less of a sonic departure than CD Wallet, Horsie employs various textures influenced by artists like Four Tet and My Bloody Valentine, the rhythmic forms of D’Angelo and Sade, and moments of ambient Americana found in the works of Ry Cooder. The cornerstone pieces of gear used were an Ensoniq EPS and Roland Juno 60, though the album also employs a great deal of electric guitar, along with his beloved SP-404. He maintains a philosophy of “less is more,” finding the simplest route from one point to another.

“Nothing To See,” finds Sagar attempting to hide in plain sight, moving through crowds of people at his shows and daydreaming of the peace and quiet at the end of the night. The song is accompanied by a music video directed by Jim Larson which situates this mood through a small cult at a Palm Springs mansion.

HOMESHAKE is an expression of adjustment and contortion within the world as he experiences it and the sounds he wants to hear in it. Hallucinatory and heartbreaking in its cries for connection, Sagar’s sound is often imitated but has proven to be entirely his own; textural and profound, uniquely honoring his diverse influences but adrift within its own transportive imagination.

With CD Wallet, Sagar took his heaviest-ever approach to his signature sounds, applying distorted guitars, blown out drums, and 90s digital synths to a devastating, sludgy sound. This feeling of challenging oneself to make work that is focused on pure self-expression dates back to Homeshake’s origin, a chaotic period during which Sagar was splitting his time between home studio recording and playing guitar in Mac Demarco’s touring band. After a long period spent on the road, he decided to leave Demarco’s group to focus entirely on his own work. Sagar approaches every album with the same frame of mind, composing purely for the joy of the moment without consideration to potential commercial reception. Now on his seventh album, a trip through the Homeshake catalog is one of evolution, reflection, and self-criticism, alongside self-love, a clear-eyed realism about the cruelties of the world and a longing for the gentler place it could be.