SLEEPKIT is a band who can genuinely be described as mind-expanding; from the nucleus of their songwriting to the texturally-ornamented arrangements, they manage to imbue each aspect of their music with a sly veneer of otherness. Sprung from the minds of songwriters, singers & co-founders Ryan Bourne (Chad VanGaalen, Ghostkeeper, Plant City Band) and Marie Sulkowski (Texture Twins), SLEEPKIT’s repertoire showcases a band whose serious understanding of the pop song is buffered by beautifully detailed, texturally-ornamented arrangements and a penchant for the slightly skewed. The seeds of SLEEPKIT were sown thanks to Ryan and Marie’s shared membership in fellow outer-limits-leaners Devonian Gardens, whose two albums allowed the two to find their patch of common ground. That band’s stylistically wide-ranging approach is largely eschewed in favour of SLEEPKIT’s more streamlined sound, one that reconciles their textural inventiveness and zoned playing techniques with the immediacy of dance music and their inherently approachable songs. They released their debut LP Champion Weekend in 2016, an amalgam of sunshiny dream-pop, post-disco and psychedelic synth-rock with shades of Giorgio Moroder to The Stooges to ELO. Bolstered by the addition of drummer Eric Hamelin (Alvvays, Ghostkeeper) and multi-instrumentalist Joleen Toner (Crystal Eyes, Plant City Band), SLEEPKIT are back with Camp Emotion, a deeply-nuanced and emotionally unarmoured refinement of their singular brand of experimental pop. Produced by Scott ‘Monty’ Munro, a prolific producer and multi-instrumentalist known for his work with Preoccupations, Chad VanGaalen, Lab Coast, and Ghostkeeper, Camp Emotion actualizes their art-pop vision in a shimmering opus that explores the outer edges of song creation – functioning as well as a dancefloor soundtrack as it does a hazy, late-night headphone session through inner space.
