Briar

Welland, and the habit of changing clothes

Daniel Romano was born in Welland, Ontario, in 1985, and has spent the better part of two decades refusing to stay in one genre long enough to be filed. He came up in the punk-leaning band Attack in Black before starting a solo run with Workin' for the Music Man in 2010, then spent years making hard country records: Sleep Beneath the Willow was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2011, Come Cry With Me followed onto the longlist in 2013, and If I've Only One Time Askin' earned a Juno nomination for adult alternative album in 2016.

What followed was less a career than a flood. Romano co-owns You've Changed Records with Steve Lambke of the Constantines, which has let him release at a pace no outside label would tolerate — in 2020 alone he put out Visions of the Higher Dream and Content to Point the Way, and made Forever Love's Fool with Danny Carey of Tool. Alongside that there has been the punk outlet Ancient Shapes, the Spider Bite project with Lambke, records cut with Julie Doiron and Frederick Squire, and, in 2025, a turn as guitarist in Pig Pen with Matty Matheson and Wade MacNeil.

Across all of it the swing has usually been between loud and louder: punk and garage at one end, country and soul-inflected rock at the other. Briar is the first of his projects to remove electricity from the equation altogether. There are no drums on the record and none on stage.

Four players, one Outfit lineage

Briar is a quartet with a fixed division of labour. Romano plays guitar and sings; Carson McHone plays bass and sings; Tommy Major plays the second guitar and sings; Fliss Horrocks plays harmonium and sings. The four-part vocal is the point of the band, not a decoration on it.

Two of those names come straight out of Romano's electric band. McHone and Major both play in the Outfit, which released Preservers of the Pearl on 13 March 2026 through You've Changed — recorded live to tape at the band's own Camera Varda studio in Welland, and billed simply as the Outfit rather than Daniel Romano's Outfit because Romano had opened the songwriting to Ian Romano, McHone and Major. Briar reads as the next step in that loosening: a band where no single voice carries the melody for long.

McHone arrived in Canada from Texas and has her own catalogue: Still Life in 2022, then Pentimento on Merge Records on 12 September 2025, cut in six days on Canada's east coast with Lambke, Colleen Coco Collins, Michael Cloud Duguay, Raha Javanfar and Romano. Horrocks is the least documented of the four — the published credits so far go no further than harmonium and voice, and nothing more substantial has been put out about the role in the band's formation.

Aeterna Memoria: eleven songs, two cassette machines

The debut arrived on 30 October 2026 on You've Changed, catalogue YC-075, on limited 12-inch vinyl and digitally. Eleven tracks: Aeterna Memoria (Rosae Crucis), Between the Air and Sky, Tomorrow I Will Make It So, Reason's Never Lost, Sliver, As the Morning Burns Away, Whir Upon the Wheel, Blood and Sugar, Where's the Relief, When I Write a Song and Will o' the Wisp. Most sit between roughly two and a half and four and a half minutes.

The recording chain is specific and deliberately narrow. The band tracked to an eight-track cassette machine using a Royer 121 and a Sennheiser 409, Romano mixed down to a two-track Marantz cassette machine, and Kristian Montano mastered. The reference points the label puts forward are British: Bert Jansch, Bridget St John, the Watersons, with vocal stacks closer to early Crosby, Stills and Nash.

The framing around the record is esoteric and Romano makes no attempt to soften it. The briar, in his telling, is a symbol of duality, and the soul's work is to collapse that duality into a higher harmonic state. The title comes from the phrase Aeterna Memoria Rosae Crucis — eternal memory, rose cross — offered as a mantra. The singing uses what he calls the Seven Egyptian Vowels, sacred tones each tied to a divine principle. The songs, he says, were wholly conjured through instant intuition and silent listening, and are sacrificial in the root sense of being made sacred, written against the turn from the Piscean age to the Aquarian.

Early coverage has been positive and brief. Raven Sings the Blues flagged the first single, As the Morning Burns Away, on 2 October 2026 as an autumnal swerve towards 1970s folk, reaching for Judee Sill and the Roches. Darryl Sterdan made the album Tinnitist's album of the week on 29 October, leading on the recording method and the vocal technique rather than any single song.

Where things stand in November 2026

Four days after the album, Briar started playing. The first headline run is twelve Canadian dates between 3 and 18 November 2026: Hamilton's Back Hall on the 3rd, the Monarch Tavern in Toronto on the 4th, the Lounge in Sudbury on the 5th, Neat Cafe in Burnstown on the 6th, Motel Chelsea in Quebec on the 7th, then east to the Cap in Fredericton on the 9th, the Carleton in Halifax on the 11th, the Legion in Sackville on the 12th and Xeroz in Moncton on the 14th, before closing back in Ontario at the Rainbow Bistro in Ottawa on the 16th, the Broom Factory in Kingston on the 17th and the NAC in St Catharines on the 18th. Eliza Niemi opens every night.

The venues say as much as the record does. These are halls, a cafe, a Legion branch and a converted factory rather than the rock rooms the Outfit works — the largest listed capacity on the run is modest, and the Chelsea date is an 85-seat afternoon show. Tickets for most of the tour went on sale through the venues and TicketWeb after the announcement, and at the point the run opened only a single date remained generally available.

No live reviews of this configuration exist yet; the tour began on the night of the album's fifth day in the world, so the only critical writing on Briar so far concerns the record and the single.

The show as it exists now

The format is set and the band has described it plainly: a folk concert crossed with theatre. Candles, incense, recitations and staged elements run through the set, and the Carleton's billing goes as far as saying the evening will resemble a play as much as a gig. Nothing is amplified beyond what two acoustic guitars, a bass and a harmonium need.

Halifax gives the clearest shape of a night: doors and start at 7pm on Wednesday 11 November, a two-hour running time, 30 dollars plus tax in advance or 40 at the door, with Niemi opening. Toronto's Monarch Tavern show on 4 November is a 19-plus room with doors at 7pm, where Romano, McHone and Niemi are all listed as performing around the Briar set. The Chelsea date is the outlier: a 3pm matinee in an 85-seat room with the restaurant serving until 9pm, where non-dining ticket holders are let in half an hour before the music.

That combination — a seated, low-light, incense-heavy room, a two-hour sit, and a band singing four-part harmony with no rhythm section — is a long way from the Outfit's live reputation, and it is the whole proposition of the project rather than a staging quirk.