Premiere: knitting wrestles with Mortality on “I Wasn’t Fully Cooked”
Photo Credit: Celeste Midori
Montreal’s knitting have returned, which features the memorable collaborations of frontperson Mischa Dempsey, guitarist/engineer Sarah Harris (Ultra Far), and drummer Andy Mulcair (Andy and the Dannys, Lovelet). knitting’s “I Wasn’t Fully Cooked” may arrive with a tongue-in-cheek title, but the trio’s latest single wrestles with something far heavier: the fear of not becoming the person you were meant to be. Premiering today on REVERIE alongside a new music video directed by Sasha Khalimonova, the track captures the anxious questions around mortality, interrupted potential, and the strange clarity that comes from confronting both. It’s a fitting preview of their sophomore album Souvenir (out June 26, 2026 via Mint Records), that shows the band continually topping their best work, reflecting on what it means to be known and remembered.
Mischa Dempsey, the band's front person, explains: "I was on tour in early 2020 and got really scared that I would die in a freak accident and would be mourned as a girl, as my old name (this fear was eventually a big impetus for me coming out to people as non-binary and changing my name). ‘I Wasn’t Fully Cooked’ was a way for me to think about what death interrupts and what gets remembered…It might be our favourite knitting song yet."
Ahead of Souvenir’s release, we caught up with Dempsey to talk about the origins of the song, working with Khalimonova on the music video, the emotional framework of the record, and what counts as a souvenir when you spend your life on the road.
REVERIE: I love the title - “I Wasn’t Fully Cooked” - what did that phrase mean for you in relation to the song?
The title is lifted directly from the lyric in the song: “and my sentence gets cut off?/and I wasn’t fully cooked?/and there was something raw inside me that deserved a closer look?”. The song is basically one run-sentence, an anxiety spiral asking unanswerable questions about what things would be like if you were gone. The song was unnamed until the week we sent the album to be mastered, and “I Wasn’t Fully Cooked” was suggested by my bandmate Sarah in a brainstorming session. I think it resonated with me because it added some lightness and comedic relief to an otherwise kind of grim song, and really encapsulated the fear at the core of the song, that something out of my control would interrupt my life and wouldn’t get to grow into my full potential as a human being.
REVERIE: This song tackles some heavy themes. Was writing it a way of processing that fear, or did it reveal something new to you in hindsight?
I wanted to write about death and fear of dying on Souvenir, and what the finality of death brings into clearer relief in life. I think I have (for the most part) left the fear I describe in this song in the past; I was on tour in early 2020 when I was experiencing this particular fear of random death, with the looming threat of global pandemic and fatal sickness in the foreground. It was ironically also the pandemic, and the lockdown and isolation, that gave me the opportunity to slow down and take a closer look at the things in my life that I had been pushing down. I was able to make decisions and take steps in my transition that helped me to feel more at ease about how I am known and how I will be remembered.
REVERIE: We love Sasha Khalimonova's work!! What was this collaboration like for you and what made that visual language feel like the right match for this song?
We love Sasha too! Sasha is incredible. We did a music video with Sasha last summer, for our song “Fold,” and it was a lot of fun – that process made me really want to work with them again. I proposed we do a video for I Wasn’t Fully Cooked because I thought the tone of the song and Sasha’s style would mesh well – I love the way they create visceral and introspective visual worlds. I had the idea to work with my friend / performance artist Celia Green, and Sasha drew up the concept for the video around this prompt. I really like working with other people to create the visual worlds for songs, I like seeing what someone else's interpretation of the music will inspire.
REVERIE: What did you want the body language in this visual to communicate that words in the song couldn’t?
I think Sasha chose to film in slow motion to really heighten the sense of anticipation in the song. The video bounces between shots of a younger character bumming around their suburban neighbourhood, trying to entertain themselves, and shots of Celia making big sweeping movements that in slow motion appear granular. Sasha wanted to capture a lot of moments just before impact – you never actually see anything go wrong, but you feel as though it might at any second, creating a sense of unease throughout the video.
REVERIE: This track is set to appear on Souvenir - any specific artists or sounds that influenced this track? Or alternatively, the sound of the record?
It’s hard to pick out influences that we kept in mind for this song specifically – I think when creating the big, slow intro we probably pulled from my bloody valentine. On the album as a whole, we pulled from classic bands like The Breeders, Slowdive, Oasis, The Breeders, and newer artists like Fontaines DC, Her New Knife, They Are Gutting a Body of Water, ML Buch, DIIV, etc. When I was pushing myself to finish the lyrics I was listening a lot to the new Wednesday album – I love the way Karly Hartzman writes.
REVERIE: Since Souvenir is so concerned with memory and what we carry with us, what’s your real-life version of a souvenir on tour? Is it a physical object, a ritual, a photo, a weird receipt stuffed in a pocket?
I try to journal in my daily life as much as possible – I think journaling on tour is a good way to frame memories and experiences. I basically never read back on what I wrote, but the experience of writing and paying attention to what’s going on helps me to remember better. So I guess the journal is a kind of Souvenir. On a less serious notes, I have a pair of plastic cats that sit in a little hole in the console in my mini van (the tour vehicle) that my brother gave me for Christmas a few years back, they’re kind of like good luck charms that watch over us and keep us safe on the road.
Souvenir is out everywhere out June 26, 2026 via Mint Records and the band will also appear at Sled Island playing at Pin-Bar June 19 and 88 Brewing June 20. Follow knitting here.
