The Zolas

A piano band from Vancouver

The Zolas were put together in Vancouver in 2009 by Zachary Gray, who sings and plays guitar, and Tom Dobrzanski, who played piano and keyboards. Their debut, Tic Toc Tic, arrived the same year and established the shape of the thing: verses crammed with specifics and proper nouns, choruses built to be shouted back. Ancient Mars followed in 2012 and produced the band's first fixed point — the title track is still one of the three songs they have put in front of audiences most often, alongside "Swooner" and "Molotov Girls".

The rhythm section that defines the group now arrived in stages. Dwight Abell on bass and Cody Hiles on drums both became permanent members in 2015, and the live line-up has since widened further, with Bronson Izzard on guitar from 2019 and Elisa Kady Pangsaeng handling sampling and programming from 2021. The band has spent its whole recording life on Light Organ Records, the Vancouver label that has released everything from Ancient Mars onwards.

The reputation was made in small rooms and built upwards. Reviewing the band at Edmonton's Starlite Room in March 2017, a writer for the University of Alberta's student paper noted the distance travelled from a handful of people watching them in a basement to a full, loud, all-ages crowd — a point Gray made from the stage himself that night, reminding the room that Edmonton had not been especially fond of the band's unknown material back when they played that basement.

Swooner and the Juno year

Swooner came out in 2016 and is the record the current tour exists to mark. Ten tracks, most of them short, it ran from "Molotov Girls" and "CV Dazzle" through "Male Gaze", "Fell In Love With New York", "Freida on the Mountain" and "Why Do I Wait (When I Know You've Got a Lover)" to the title song. It leaned harder on sequencers and processed keyboards than anything the band had made before, without giving up Dobrzanski's piano as the load-bearing element.

The following year brought the band's only major-award recognition to date: a Juno nomination for Group of the Year in 2017. It also brought the loss of a founder. Dobrzanski left in 2017 to spend time with his newborn child, though he stayed attached to the band's records as a producer. By April 2026 the Georgia Straight was reporting the separation as final on the performing side — Dobrzanski has stepped away to work in production full-time, which leaves the anniversary tour in the odd position of celebrating a record whose keyboard signature was largely his.

Come Back to Life, then nothing

Come Back to Life, released in 2021, was the first Zolas album made without Dobrzanski at the keyboard. It pulled the band towards nineties British guitar pop and mixed personal writing with flat political observation; reviewers at the time credited it with balancing that nostalgia against the band's own habits, while finding the middle stretch uneven. It remains their most recent full-length of new material.

What followed was a slow fade rather than a break-up. There were festival and park shows through 2022 and 2023 — Summerlight in Vancouver, Barnside Harvest Fest in Ladner, outdoor bills in Coquitlam and Kelowna — and two standalone singles, "Craigslist Killer" and "Anything Can Happen On the Holiest Of Days", which still sit at the top of the band's Bandcamp discography. Then the shows stopped. The band's last logged performance before the current run was an outdoor set at McArthur Island Park in Kamloops on 28 September 2024.

During the quiet, Gray spent a long stretch out of the country and the band's social accounts, once heavily worked, went dormant. No statement was issued and no end date was given, which is why the reissue landed as news rather than as a scheduled product.

The return, dated

Gray came back to Vancouver over the winter of 2026 and the band reconvened. On 4 March 2026 Light Organ issued Swooner (10th Anniversary Special Edition), a fifteen-track expansion of the original album with five bonus cuts: a new song, "All Your Pretty Songs", plus "Island Life", "Where Evil Grows", "Cold Feet" and a remix of "Molotov Girls" by Steve Bays. It is the first new Zolas recording since 2024 and the only new writing they have released since the hiatus began.

The tour was announced in early April, with Vancouver tickets going on sale on 8 April 2026 and the Georgia Straight describing a six-city Canadian run through Toronto, Ottawa, Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary. The schedule as it now stands is denser than six shows: Lee's Palace in Toronto on 1 October, Cicada Music and Arts Festival in St Catharines on 2 October, Club SAW in Ottawa on 3 October, two nights at the Pearl in Vancouver on 7 and 10 October, the Capital Ballroom in Victoria on 9 October, and the Starlite Room in Edmonton on 14 October, with Calgary closing the run.

Demand has run ahead of the room sizes. The Toronto date at Lee's Palace, a 19-plus show priced at $34.50 with Jia opening, sold out well before the autumn. The second Vancouver night at the Pearl was not part of the original announcement. Gray has not confirmed that new material is in progress, and nothing beyond the reissue has been announced, so the honest read is that this is an anniversary run rather than a comeback campaign — though a band that has just written its first new song in two years and sold out its Toronto show has the obvious reasons to keep going.

The room, the set, the encore

The Zolas have never been a long-set band. Their logged shows run between seven and thirteen songs depending on whether they are headlining or playing a festival slot; the Kamloops set in September 2024 ran thirteen songs across seventy-five minutes, from 7.50pm to 9.05pm, and a Coquitlam park show in August 2023 ran twelve. Headline sets have historically drawn from across the catalogue rather than one record — the 2017 Starlite Room show opened with "In Heaven", took in "Cultured Man", "You're Too Cool" and "Strange Girl" from as far back as Tic Toc Tic, and closed on the title track from Swooner.

Staging is minimal and the performance is close-quarters. The Gateway's reviewer described the band's manner as candid and playful, singled out Abell as the most animated bassist they had seen, and reported that the encore involved Gray walking into the middle of the crowd with a microphone and a very small keyboard. The same night the crowd was loud enough, and young enough, that two drunk audience members got past security and onto the stage, and Gray used a between-song gap to tell the room that "Alberta is the hope of Canada". That mix — tight, danceable, slightly chaotic at the edges — is what the October rooms are being sold on.