Palace Oaks Finds Solitude on Debut Album Insular Mountains
Madeleine Young. Photo credit: Holden Mckechnie.
When I log onto Zoom with Madeleine Young, the mind and hands behind Victoria folkgaze project Palace Oaks, the first thing I notice is the walls behind her. A Jung People poster stares out from one side, Mitski from the other. It feels like a meaningful signifier of the places she’s been and the sonic balance she strikes on her debut full-length Insular Mountains: sprawling, noisy textures on one end and intimate confessional songwriting on the other. For me, it was also personal. I still remember picking up Jung People’s record in a Calgary shop years ago, and for Young, they weren’t just a high school obsession for her - band member Bryan Buss was one of the the first to ever buy her music.
Young’s musical story is full of migrations. Born in Seattle, she grew up in Calgary’s suburbs, spent time in Edmonton during university, and eventually settled on Vancouver Island, where she says she feels most at home on a “base sensory level.” Growing up in the suburbs often felt isolating, but it also shaped her sense of environment and belonging. Even the name Palace Oaks is a relic of that time—”I stole the name of a townhouse complex that was in the neighbourhood I grew up in,” she explains. Calgary may have felt isolating, but Sled Island, Calgary Folk Fest, and CJSW gave her a sense of community and helped shape her taste. Palace Oaks first took shape in 2017, though Young didn’t start pursuing it seriously until 2020, just as the pandemic cut off her first chance at live shows. The early songs were sparse, “emo folk” sketches written with an acoustic guitar, but even then she was “trying to make noisy music with folk instrumentation.” Now, she says, the balance has inverted: “I feel like I’m trying to make folk music with noisy instrumentation.”
That tension sits at the heart of Insular Mountains, released exclusively on bandcamp August 8. The title comes from a geographic term for the ranges that span Vancouver Island and Haida Gwaii, but Young was drawn to its dual meaning—vast and beautiful yet isolating and claustrophobic. “The mountains became both a literal and metaphorical barrier for me,” she says. “Being surrounded on all sides by the ocean and peaks, there are times you really do feel enclosed, and that sense of isolation seeped into the record.” Moving west also changed the way she wrote, pulling nature imagery into her lyrics in a way she hadn’t experienced before. She recalls reading an online thread about The Microphones where someone dismissed Phil Elverum’s writing as “just a string of ham-fisted nature metaphors,” and another person replied: that’s simply what life in the Pacific Northwest feels like. “I think about that a lot,” Young admits. “Nature is so much more visible and just a bigger part of the experience of the world around you. It's hard to not take influence from that.”
The record is threaded with grief, loss, and the strange stillness of isolation, but also with moments of beauty. Across its nine songs, ranging from the noisy pulse of “Rain Shadow” to the expansive, nearly eight-minute title track, Young explores the edges where folk, shoegaze, and post-rock blur together. Her vocal harmonies nod to ’60s and ’70s British folk duos like Maddy Prior and June Tabor, while her guitar work carries shades of Yo La Tengo, Wednesday, and the noisy indie rock she grew up loving. “I think of it as if Wednesday was influenced by British folk instead of country,” she says.
Even as Palace Oaks grows, Young keeps busy with other projects. She recently played a show under a Victoria bridge with her organ-and-drone project Death Wreath, where the sound reverberated off the concrete and water in what she describes as “dreamy and beautiful.” That same DIY spirit runs through Victoria’s scene, which is still patching holes left by venue closures during COVID. Community centre gigs, art space shows, and outdoor events have become lifelines for emerging artists. She shouts out newer local acts Ghost Darling and Death Makes Stardust, alongside longtime inspiration Kathryn Calder, whose 2015 self-titled album remains one of her favourites.
For now, Palace Oaks has largely lived on record, but Young is preparing to bring the project to the stage with a full band. “Up until now, it’s been recording-only, but I want to transition into actually playing shows,” she says. Looking ahead, she doesn’t want to repeat herself. Instead, she imagines leaning further into atmospheric folk, drawing inspiration from albums like UFOF by Big Thief. “I’m the kind of person who doesn’t really want to do the exact same thing twice,” she admits.
Self-produced and performed entirely by Young, Insular Mountains feels deeply personal yet wide open, a work that finds beauty in hopeless moments and intimacy in noise. Sitting beneath those posters of Jung People and Mitski, Young seems to embody the same balance her record strives for—one eye on the formative influences of the past, another fixed on the vast landscapes ahead.
