Cleopatrick

Friends since they were four

Cleopatrick are Luke Gruntz on vocals and guitar and Ian Fraser on drums, both raised in Cobourg, a town on the north shore of Lake Ontario east of Toronto. They have known each other since they were four, and by their account it was hearing AC/DC around the age of eight that settled the question of what they were going to do. The band took its current shape in 2015, and the first EP, titled 14, appeared on 14 February 2016 — a teenage document released while they were still local.

The song that changed the maths was 'hometown', released in 2017. It reached No. 6 on the US Mainstream Rock chart, a placing that usually requires label muscle behind it and which this duo reached without any. A second EP, The Boys, followed on 29 June 2018, and the same year they played Lollapalooza. The template was set early: two players, no bassist, guitar tuned down and treated to fill the gap, and drums written more like hip-hop programming than rock backbeat.

Bummer, and the decision to own it

The debut album Bummer arrived on 4 June 2021 through Nowhere Special Recordings, the duo's own imprint, and charted at No. 89 on the UK download chart. Its single 'family van' reached No. 32 on the US Mainstream Rock chart. Running their own label has shaped everything since — release timing, artwork, the decision to put out a mixtape rather than a single, and the absence of any obligation to repeat a formula that worked.

The touring that followed built the audience that still turns up. They supported Royal Blood across North America in April and May 2022, played Reading and Leeds in 2022, and Rock im Park in 2023. Two smaller releases kept the gap busy: the Doom EP on 21 October 2022 and 2 Doom Demos on 20 October 2023. Comparisons in the press tended towards Highly Suspect, Royal Blood, Arctic Monkeys and Catfish and the Bottlemen, which says more about the shape of the riffs than about what the band were listening to.

Fake Moon and the sound change

The second album was trailed by three singles — 'HAMMER' on 1 November 2024, 'PLEASE' on 22 January 2025 and 'BAD GUY' on 12 February 2025 — and each one signalled that the heavy blues-punk of Bummer was being dismantled. Fake Moon came out on 14 March 2025 on Nowhere Special, ten tracks, produced by Gruntz and Fraser with Phil Weinrobe. It opens on crushed 8-bit guitar tone over a static drum pattern and spends much of its length in synth lines, glitched vocals and deliberately degraded textures, with the lyrics circling isolation, masculinity, small-town life and self-doubt.

Reviews largely accepted the shift as necessary rather than opportunistic. Far Out gave it three and a half stars on 13 March 2025, picking out 'Heat Death', 'PLEASE', 'Big Machine' and 'LOVE YOU', conceding that some passages 'can feel somewhat directionless or too loose' but concluding that 'it's a delicate balancing act, but one cleopatrick executes well, crafting a sense of fluidity amid the chaos'.

Gruntz has been direct about why the record sounds the way it does. Speaking in September 2025, he said the pop-leaning direction was a deliberate choice and that he did not 'want to put on a character and make something because I think that's what my facade is supposed to be'. He named 'Chew' as the moment the sessions with Weinrobe clicked, and acknowledged plainly that part of the existing audience preferred the heavier debut.

Ten years, and a mixtape

September 2025 brought the band's first Australian headline shows: Crowbar Brisbane on the 25th, Howler in Melbourne on the 26th after a venue upgrade, and Crowbar Sydney on the 27th. In an interview published on 13 September 2025, Gruntz trailed 'a really unique little project' to mark ten years as a band, and said he expected it to land with the fans who came for the heavier material.

That project turned out to be SCRAP, released on 5 December 2025. It runs twelve tracks but only six are full songs — 'BURNER PHONE', 'GUTS', 'NOW ZERO', 'TALK DOWN', 'SEVENTEEN' and the closing 'STILL' — stitched together with short interludes of well under a minute each, among them 'no sleep cash only', 'morale check' and 'much love'. It pairs the lo-fi sampler aesthetic of Fake Moon with fuzz-heavy rarities and b-sides, presented as a decade marker rather than a third album.

Where they stand now

Through 2026 the band have worked small rooms rather than the festival stages of 2022 and 2023. A west-coast run in May took in Polaris Hall in Portland on the 21st, Studio 919 in Victoria on the 23rd and The Pearl in Vancouver on the 25th — venues in the few-hundred-capacity bracket, a long way from opening for Royal Blood in arenas.

The next confirmed shows are a short eastern Canadian run in October 2026: the Bronson Centre in Ottawa on the 15th, Grizzly Fuzz in Québec City on the 16th and Théâtre Fairmount in Montreal on the 17th. The band have also said publicly that further 2026 gigs remain unannounced and that a third album is in progress, though no title or date has been attached to it.

The practical position is a band with two very different back catalogues to reconcile on stage every night, a self-owned label that lets them release a half-interlude mixtape without asking anyone, and an audience split between the people who came for 'hometown' and the ones who came for the static.