Jets Overhead

A name taken from the sky over London

Jets Overhead came together in Victoria, British Columbia in 2003 around Adam Kittredge on vocals, Piers Henwood on guitar, Jocelyn Greenwood on bass and Brendan Pye on drums. Kittredge had settled on the name while watching air traffic patterns over London. Antonia Freybe-Smith joined shortly afterwards as a second vocalist, and Luke Renshaw took over the drum stool from Pye — the line-up that has stood ever since, with Kittredge and Henwood both moving between guitar and keyboards alongside Freybe-Smith.

The two-vocalist arrangement decided a great deal about how the band sounded. Kittredge's lead sits inside Freybe-Smith's harmony rather than above it, and the guitars are treated more as weather than as riffs. A self-titled EP in 2003 reached No. 42 on the CMJ chart, which was enough to put a small Vancouver Island band in front of American college radio before it had a full-length record to sell.

Bridges, and giving the record away first

The debut album Bridges arrived in 2006 on a pay-what-you-want basis — more than a year before Radiohead did the same thing with In Rainbows and got the credit for inventing it. The record was produced by Neil Osborne and mixed by Warne Livesey, and it earned the band a Juno nomination for New Group of the Year in 2007.

What followed was several years of unusually wide touring for a band of that size. Jets Overhead played Coachella, Bonnaroo, Sasquatch! and SXSW, performed during the 2010 Winter Olympics, and took the record through the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland and China. On the Canadian circuit they shared bills with Broken Social Scene and Tegan and Sara, and Songkick's tally of their history has them appearing with Our Lady Peace nineteen times and Neverending White Lights seventeen — a support-slot career built on being the band that could warm a large room without competing with it.

No Nations, Boredom and Joy, and a full stop in 2013

The second album, No Nations, came in 2009. It was made on Hornby Island with Osborne producing again and Malcolm Burn mixing, and its single 'Heading for Nowhere' reached No. 26 on Canadian rock radio while picking up airplay in Los Angeles. The band's live form from that period is documented on Live at Sasquatch Festival 2010, released on 3 May 2011: nine songs in 37 minutes and 32 seconds, drawn from the EP, Bridges and No Nations.

Boredom and Joy followed in 2012, produced by Emery Dobyns and pushed towards a drier, more played-in sound, with string arrangements written by Dobyns and Travis's Fran Healy. It brought radio play and television placements, including episodes of House and Pretty Little Liars — the kind of income that keeps a mid-level band on the road.

Then the road stopped. The band toured heavily until 2013 and simply did not book anything after that. The reason given is the ordinary one: five people with young children, and a touring model that does not accommodate them. There was no split announcement and no farewell show. Jets Overhead just went quiet for roughly twelve years, with the 2018 compilation The Timing: 15 Years of Jets Overhead standing in for activity.

Opening the archive, 2025

The first sign of life was not new writing but old tape. In 2025 the band began releasing material that had sat unheard since the touring years, issuing the singles 'Ordinary Dreamers', a reading of Neil Young's 'Mr. Soul' and 'Don't Talk' ahead of a nine-track collection, Ordinary Dreamers – Rarities and Demos, Vol. 1, on 7 November 2025.

The credits on it read as a map of the band's own history. Most of the record is self-produced, recorded and mixed by Kittredge; 'Don't Talk' carries Emery Dobyns from the Boredom and Joy sessions and 'Don't Wake The Sun' carries Neil Osborne from the first two albums, with the artwork by James Kingsley. Songwriting is credited across all five members. The 'Vol. 1' is doing obvious work — the band described it as opening the archives, which implies the archive is not empty yet.

New songs, and a return date

Working through the vault seems to have restarted the writing. 'When You Catch Me' appeared in 2026 through Microgroove, credited as a composition to all five members and performed by the same line-up that made Bridges twenty years earlier. A second new single, 'No Reply', followed on 14 August 2026. Neither is an archive piece, and between them they make the 2025 releases look less like a tidy-up and more like a run-up.

The return to the stage was confirmed for the autumn: two nights at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver on 9 and 10 October 2026, opening for 54-40, both on sale through Ticketmaster. The band have described it as a career-spanning opening set and their first performance in over a decade. Vancouver and Victoria are the two cities they have played most — 28 shows apiece over the band's history — so the comeback is happening in front of the audience that already knows the records rather than in a city being reintroduced to them.

The scale is worth stating plainly. This is a support booking in a 990-capacity room, not a headline tour, and nothing beyond the two Commodore nights has been announced. Around 8,800 people track the band for concert alerts on Songkick, a number accumulated largely during a silence, which is the useful measure of whether an audience waited.