Across Salt, you’ll find a deep engagement with the bones of Half Moon Run’s beginnings, but the album reaches equally into the future with songs penned during the pandemic that bear the current moment’s all-permeating anxieties and the deep and universal need for hope. “In the thick of the pandemic it felt as if many people were uprooting their lives and moving on to some greener pasture,” Devon Portielje explains of the sentiment behind freshly-written “Everyone’s Moving Out East.” “Perhaps part of you would want to go with them but alas, you must stay.” Half Moon Run have called Montreal home since 2009, when they lived within a few blocks’ radius of each other in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood. Music was all they did. Their earliest musical concoctions were formulated at the Torn Curtain: a legendary DIY rehearsal studio that was central to the development of an extremely influential experimental local music scene in the early 2000s. The Torn Curtain has since been torn down and replaced by characterless condos, making it a place that is now only accessible through memory. “We would spend entire days there, writing and jamming and drinking and talking, sometimes napping, more jamming before biking back home late at night,” explains Molander. “I remember Devon holding a portable cassette recorder up over his shoulder as we biked close together, listening to the playback of the demos we’d made that same day.”
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