Still Depths Rip It Up Like Hell
Still Depths. Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder).
Still Depths were born in Calgary basements, raised on DIY chaos, and now find themselves split between the West Coast and the prairies. Since forming in 2019, the trio of Brendan Chiu, Megan Rollinson, and Justin Perdomo have carved out a reputation for unpredictability and sheer joy in imperfection. Their new record, Like Hell!, released this past July, is the purest distillation of that ethos yet: jagged, messy, and alive.
The band’s beginnings were as unassuming as they were chaotic. Their first show took place in a friend’s basement, part birthday party, part experiment. Megan, who had never played bass before joining, remembers it as a blur: “It was probably really messy. I think I forgot how to play one of the songs.” Brendan came into the fold after responding to a poster pinned up at the University of Calgary. “It was this stock image of a drummer,” he laughs. “I thought it sounded kind of corny, but I figured I’d give it a shot. And it turned out to be cool.”
From those early basement sets to slots at local staples like NVRLND (where we conducted this interview and coincidentally they played their first ever show), Rockin’ for Dollars, and The Palomino, their sound has always leaned into noise and accident, finding beauty in things falling apart and piecing them back together.
That love of rough edges defines Like Hell! as much as it does the band’s origin story. Written and recorded in a makeshift basement studio in Burnaby, BC, the record embraces spontaneity with the kind of abandon few bands would dare. The trio chopped up recordings of their own rehearsals, sampled entire masters of their old songs, layered in blown-out textures, and treated the studio itself as another instrument. “Sometimes we didn’t bother to tune our instruments or properly mic anything up,” Brendan and Justin admit. “We just hit record and focused on ignoring fussiness. We like music that feels like it’s alive.”
The band describes their release as “part dance record, part noise collage, part existential clown show.” Songs like “Boy Fight” and “Smoking Dope in Hell” stumble gleefully between basement rave and bar fight, aggression and humor colliding in jagged harmony. “It’s like collaging your own music,” Perdomo explains. “Sampling yourself means you don’t have to worry about legality, you just stretch it, cut it up, and make it new.” Even the album artwork came from a burst of improvisation: a collage Chiu threw together one night that ended up shaping the record’s visual identity and even inspiring some of the song titles.
Still Depths. Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder).
For a band so rooted in Calgary’s music scene, geography has become one of their biggest creative hurdles. Chiu and Perdomo both relocated to Vancouver for school, while Rollinson remains in Calgary. The long-distance dynamic means Still Depths often operate by file-swapping and bursts of activity when they reunite. “Whenever we get to be in the same city, it’s so nice,” Rollinson says. “The songs get to develop as three people instead of piecework. But we’ve been doing the long-distance thing for so long that it almost feels normal.”
When they do make it back home, Calgary welcomes them with open arms. They single out The Palomino for always treating them well, praising the venue for its promotion, hospitality, and fair pay in a city where spaces can be scarce. Vancouver, by contrast, feels like a harder environment to sustain. Venues shutter regularly, attendance fluctuates, and financial realities make it tougher to survive. “Shows are almost all pay-what-you-can,” Perdomo says. “Sometimes that’s good, but sometimes venues get sick of it. It doesn’t pay as consistently as Calgary, and it’s tough when you can’t make enough from shows to keep going.” The scene, they add, ebbs and flows, with pockets of incredible music balanced by waves of exhaustion.
Through it all, Still Depths have stayed independent by choice. While they considered label offers, the band ultimately chose to self-release Like Hell!. “We keep all the rights to our music and we can still benefit from the connections and experience of having management. It’s straightforward, no fine print. And we don’t have to wait around a year and a half for grant cycles to line up before we can release something. If we finish a record, we can just put it out.”
That autonomy suits the band, their records sound less like carefully plotted projects and more like sudden bursts of collective imagination, collages of sound stitched together from whatever happens to be at hand. The next chapter might look different, though. They’ve been talking about making a record that strips away layers instead of building them up, one that feels closer to their live shows. “We want to make a bunch of songs, work on them for a long time, then record them in just a few days,” Perdomo says. “It has a totally different feeling. More raw, more direct.” At the same time, they’ve been quietly experimenting with laptop recordings and electronic music, hinting that their future might stretch even further into new directions.
For now, the band undertook their most ambitious outing yet, touring with Preoccupations earlier this year and again with Guerilla Toss in the fall, taking them beyond Calgary and Vancouver to international stages. Rollinson hopes to move further west by the end of the year, closing the distance between the band and giving Still Depths a chance to create together more consistently. But whether they’re collaging percussion, singing through dual mics, or smashing together sounds that shouldn’t work but somehow do, their commitment to experimentation remains.
