Wolf Parade

A pub kitchen, a bedroom, and one week to learn the songs

Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner first met working in a pub kitchen in Victoria, British Columbia, and reconnected in Montreal around 2003. The writing started in Krug's bedroom, and the original plan was that only Boeckner would sing — an arrangement that collapsed quickly enough that two-singer trade-offs became the band's defining structural habit. Arlen Thompson was recruited to play drums for the first show with roughly a week to rehearse the material.

Krug has described the early period as largely unplanned: among the first gigs was a last-minute opening slot alongside Arcade Fire, before that band's own breakthrough. The route to a record deal was similarly informal. Boeckner knew Isaac Brock from touring days with Atlas Strategic; Brock, then scouting for Sub Pop, brought the label to see Wolf Parade play in Montreal, and the band was signed the next day. Brock went on to produce the debut.

Apologies to the Queen Mary, and the argument over the mix

Apologies to the Queen Mary arrived in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2006. It almost sounded like a different record: the band were sent professional mixes from a Los Angeles studio and rejected them, preferring their own rougher versions. Brock disapproved. Krug's own account is blunt — the band were stubborn and young, which is why the record sounds the way it does.

That stubbornness is audible on the song that has since overtaken everything else in the catalogue. Krug wrote "I'll Believe in Anything" around 2003–04 in a Montreal loft, initially as a solo piece under his Sunset Rubdown name, and the recorded version keeps a jarring Roland Jupiter 4 arpeggiator and layers of pitch-shifted audio that leave a strange warble across the track. It was the sort of detail that marked the album as a document of a particular Montreal moment rather than a commercial proposition.

Four more records, one long absence

At Mount Zoomer followed in 2008, by which point synth player Hadji Bakara had left to pursue academic work, and Expo 86 came in 2010. The band then went on indefinite hiatus from 2011, with Krug, Boeckner and Thompson scattering across solo and side projects.

They reunited in 2016, releasing Cry Cry Cry in 2017 and Thin Mind in 2020. Dante DeCaro left in 2019 after years of touring, and the group has operated as a core three-piece since, with Bakara returning briefly for some 2022 shows and Arcade Fire's Tim Kingsbury joining as a touring musician. Thin Mind remains the most recent studio album; as of October 2026 there is no announced successor.

What a Crave series did to the arithmetic

Heated Rivalry, the Crave drama about two rival professional hockey players in a relationship off the ice, used "I'll Believe in Anything" in its fifth episode — an episode named after the song — under a scene in which a player comes out by kissing his partner on the ice after a cup win. The episode first aired on 19 December 2025. Spotify plays of the song rose by 2,658 per cent, and in January 2026 it reached number four on Billboard's US Alternative Digital Song Sales chart and number seven on Rock Digital Song Sales. By late April 2026, Sub Pop put the track at 40 million Spotify streams, 21 million of them accumulated since the episode.

Krug's response has been detached rather than triumphal. He told interviewers that the band knew of the show's director, Jacob Tierney, and that the premise appealed, but that the song itself now feels remote: "To be honest, it's like another person wrote the song, because it was so long ago." His stated position is that once a song is recorded and released it is left to do its thing, and that the interesting question is how the placement changes the way the song is heard. He has also said he does not follow hockey closely and had not finished the series.

Cashing the moment in sideways

Rather than rush a record, the band and Sub Pop have fed the renewed attention back into the catalogue. The label reissued Apologies to the Queen Mary on pink vinyl in 2026, restoring it to its original single-LP format; it had previously been available only as a sold-out three-LP deluxe edition from 2016.

On 3 September 2026 Sub Pop released "I'll Believe in Anything (Trixie Mattel Remix)" — catalogue number SP1762, paired with an extended mix — a dance reworking by the drag performer and musician, with proceeds going to the Lambert House LGBTQ+ youth centre. Krug has also issued a solo piano reading of the song, recorded at Risque Disque in Ladysmith, British Columbia, after he played it that way at Unreal City Fest in Vancouver in January 2026. For a band whose debut was built on refusing a clean mix, the sequence of a pink repress, a club remix and a bare piano version is a reasonably honest picture of where the song now sits.

The 2026 touring year, and the nine dates still to come

The 2025 run marking twenty years of Apologies to the Queen Mary played the album front to back, with Montreal's TV Erased opening the Toronto stop at the Concert Hall and a five-song encore drawing on At Mount Zoomer and the post-reunion albums. Exclaim!'s review of that night made the point that the record survives the front-to-back treatment because no single song dominates it, and that three players produced a sound far larger than the line-up suggested.

This year has been less ceremonial. The band played a short southern Ontario run in March 2026 — the Warehouse in St Catharines on the 11th and 12th, Bridgeworks in Hamilton on the 13th and Sonic Hall in Guelph on the 14th — announced the previous November with Boeckner promising limited capacities and "a melange of tuneage" rather than another album recital. Festival dates followed: Phillips Backyard in Victoria on 12 July, the FIFA Fan Festival in Vancouver on 15 July, and Osheaga in Montreal on 1 August, where Cult MTL found the band tight and the set a heartfelt homecoming, closing on "I'll Believe in Anything".

Nine dates remain on sale. The autumn run opens at the Palace Theatre in Calgary on 10 November and Midway Music Hall in Edmonton on 11 November, then takes three nights at the Pearl in Vancouver from 13 to 15 November, with Destroyer supporting the Canadian shows. Seattle's Showbox at the Market follows on 29 November with Lex Walton opening, and the year ends with MTELUS in Montreal on 10 December, Ottawa on 11 December and History in Toronto on 12 December.