Premiere: Verttigo’s Highly-Anticipated Return with “Tomorrow is Gone”
Photo credit: https://www.instagram.com/tanjerynestudio
There’s something beautifully disorienting about Verttigo. Emerging from Edmonton’s tight-knit music community, the band channel the shadowed romance nostalgic shoegaze, goth, and dreampop into something that immediately captures our attention when they debuted with “Autumn.” With their new single and video “Tomorrow Is Gone” — the title track from their forthcoming album — Verttigo lean fully into a dreamlike haze, pairing dizzying washes of reverb with themes of love, loss, and rebirth. We chatted with the band to learn more about their work that is moody, immersive, and aesthetically meticulous, as Verttigo takes a step forward and invites us into the swirl with them.
REVERIE: For readers who are discovering Verttigo for the first time, how would you introduce the band? Who are you, and what are you about?
Verttigo is a project that takes a lot of influence from dreampop, shoegaze and goth artists from the 80's & 90's. We are inspired by the darker side of music, art and film. We focus on creating an uniform aesthetic across all of our artistic mediums.
REVERIE: How did Verttigo come together?
Verttigo is a band that grew out of various previous projects and collaborations from all of the members of the band. As things developed over the years, the stars truly aligned in early 2025. Everyone was available and in a place in their life to really commit to seeing the project to fruition. This synchronicity created a perfect moment for everything to fall into place. The friendships that have organically grown among members over the years in the Edmonton music community just galvanized the band into a family.
REVERIE: Where does the name “Verttigo” come from? What does it represent to you?
I think Verttigo can mean a lot of things. There is the obvious nod to the inspiration of film noir and Hitchcock. Sonically speaking it describes the dreamlike and sometimes dizzying state that is created in shoegaze music with reverb, delay and pitch modulation. But lyrically Verttigo refers to the exploration of the darker side of the human condition, circling themes of love, death, loss, and rebirth, living in a state of vertigo.
REVERIE: What were your individual musical backgrounds before forming the band? Did you come from similar scenes or totally different worlds?
Everyone involved in the project has been in various types of bands ranging from metal to indie and hardcore to electronic. But the thing about Edmonton is that the music community is quite small and you eventually end up knowing everyone. A lot of people play in multiple projects, so that has a way of connecting everyone and creating a cross-pollination of creativity.
REVERIE: What artists, records, or movements have shaped your musical identity the most? Are there any unexpected influences?
The sound of Verttigo is inspired by shoegaze, goth and dreampop from the 80s and 90s. So there are a lot of classic influences such as My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins & The Cure. But in the same breath we are equally influenced by more modern shoegaze such as DIIV, Beach House, Blonde Redhead, Bambara & Tamaryn. Within the band, everyone has a really eclectic taste. At any given moment, a van playlist could shift from K-Pop Demon Hunterz to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and then from Pixel Grip to SAULT.
REVERIE: What does your creative process typically look like? Does someone bring in a full idea, or do songs evolve collaboratively in the room?
A lot of what is on the debut record was written in the past and evolved over time. “Tomorrow Is Gone” is a bit of a love letter to a moment of self-reflection and change. It's a singular story and a bit of a time capsule. But as the band continues to grow collectively, the new music is being created more spontaneously. We've already written the majority of our second record and have a lot of new music on the way. We try to focus on not overthinking the writing process and let the music present itself and tell us what it's meant to be. As artists we are just the radios tuning into frequencies transmitting from the other side.
REVERIE: With this new video and single, what feels different or like a step forward for Verttigo? How does it reflect where you are right now as a band
The music video for the title track Tomorrow Is Gone was a beautiful serendipitous collaboration. It was a vulcan mind meld with the Verttigo team and photo and video heavyweights Marc J Chalifoux and Daniel R Brand. We bonded in our mutual love of David Lynch, Gasper Noe, and underground cult cinema. Oddly enough, the track “Tomorrow Is Gone” was actually the first song ever written for Verttigo with an early demo being created in 2011. So I guess it's a step forward and backward, which kinda suits the title.
REVERIE: Are there any bands in your local scene that you feel people should have their eye on?
So many amazing bands out there in the Canadian scene, you could never mention them all. But off the top of our heads of some that come to mind are: Tebby and The Heavy, Midnight Peg and Lushclot, Truster, Uncanny Valley, ANI, Chairman, Bridgeland, Sunglaciers, Devours, Revolution Before Disorder, Bonnie Trash, Hot Garbage, and Slash Need. Honestly, that doesn't even scratch the surface of all the great bands we are pals with. The list is truly endless and Canada always punches way above its weight class for music. I truly believe Alberta in particular is starting to have a big surge in new music and it's really exciting.
REVERIE: What’s next for the band?
The band will be releasing our debut 12-inch record on March 13 in Calgary at the Palomino and March 14 at the Starlite's Temple in Edmonton. After that we are headed down to play two shows at Treefort fest in Boise, ID. In June will be doing an extensive North American tour that will include Dum Dum Fest in Los Angeles. We plan to play as many festivals as possible and focus on getting into Europe in the fall and winter of 2027. We plan to be back in the studio soon and aiming to release our sophomore record in 2027.
