The mug of coffee is hot and awakens my morning brain as Devon Portielje of Half Moon Run joins Montreal Rocks to talk about the new EP, childhood memories of big choruses, exploring the process of reducing ideas into songs, looking to the future as a trio again amid the uncertainty of the future and the one world that encompasses their DNA.

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“I'm proud of the fact that, as we live and grow, we're able to continue to make music that evolves and changes and seems to be meaningful,” Conner Molander observes as his band, Half Moon Run, crosses the 10th-anniversary mark. “It's not like we found a trick and had a successful album because of that trick, but 10 years is a long time to be with a group of people doing creative work. You have to keep on allowing yourself to change and grow... and leave things behind.”

And by that standard, Half Moon Run are in the midst of their most profound evolution to date.

When you consider everything the Montreal band have accomplished and achieved and gained and lost in their lifespan, the past decade may as well have been a century. This was a group born between revolutions: B.C natives Molander and Dylan Phillips connected with Ottawa expat Devon Portielje in the Mile End a few years after Arcade Fire had put the city on the international indie-rock map, and just before the trio’s fellow jam-space tenant Grimes would usher in a new chapter of Montreal DIY lore. But in the midst of this transitional moment, Half Moon Run forged a singular sound that looked beyond Montreal’s past and future toward the realm of the timeless. Theirs is a sound that inspires all sorts of colourful, contradictory descriptors—folk music for the modern dark age, art-rock for harmony-pop enthusiasts, rustic indie anthems for neoclassical heads—but no matter what you call it, the physical and emotional responses among listeners is always the same: heartbeats accelerate, goosebumps rise, eye sockets well up. “The chemistry just fused,” says Molander of the group’s formative period. “We decided that we were going to drop everything else that we might want to pursue in our lives and just go full steam ahead with the band. I dropped out of university—there was no going back at that point.”



Half Moon Run have certainly come a long way—musically, spiritually, geographically—since their humble beginnings in Montreal’s Mile End. But after 10 years, three albums, hundreds of shows, and one global pandemic, Half Moon Run have truly come—in the words of their 2012 signature song—full circle.

“The reason that we quit our jobs and dropped out of school in the first place is because the three of us do have this kind of triangular chemistry,” Molander says. “I think if we had gotten back in the room together and we felt that wasn't there, then we’d have to quit because it was the time to make those kinds of decisions. But it felt wonderful. It really was a pleasure, and I can't wait to make a full-length album in this new-but-old configuration.”

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