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VANDEN DOOL

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With the release of the I Don’t Know if You Can Love Me EP, Vanden Dool blends spacious and vintage new wave style pop, post-punk, and indie/dream pop.

 

"I've always pulled from music that was made since I started making music despite using modern technology to make it. There's a character to 80s new wave, synth-pop and post-punk that speaks to me, and the artists contemporary to me that I love the most also pull from these sources. Despite being mostly into alternative music and valuing artistic integrity over making a product with mainstream potential, I still very much have pop sensibilities when it comes to the structure of my songs as do those artists, so I do try to throw in hooks and melodic bits to keep the listener engaged," explains songwriter Ty Vanden Dool of his release.

The dry, suburban prairie landscape of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada is not an
immediately obvious candidate for the birthplace of someone in a genre as
inherently metropolitan as synth-pop. Nor would you expect the sounds of
CHVRCHES, Depeche Mode and M83 to cut through the noise of hard rock,
country and heavy metal. Yet, this happened with Ty Vanden Dool, who has
left his own personal stamp on the genre for over a decade and taken it with
him up to his new home in Calgary.


Vanden Dool’s latest output is a new EP, I Don’t Know if You Can Love Me.
Following his pattern of focusing on a single theme, with 2023’s Poverty and
Pop Culture on the high life and its unattainability and 2020’s The View from
Here EP on life in Lethbridge, I Don’t Know if You Can Love Me simply
focuses on love and the seemingly incurable pain that arises when it is
unrequited.


With help partly from a recording crew at MacEwan University’s Artist in
Residence program in Edmonton but mostly from the humble home setup of
longtime friend Tristan Smetana in Calgary, the tracks jump from the dark, clublike “I Want Your World”, to the single “Not What You Want” with its energetic rhythm section, to the slow waltz-like closer “When I Can See You”. Despite each track’s differences, they are unified in being an unmistakable reflection of Vanden Dool’s tastes.

 


I Don’t Know if You Can Love Me continues Vanden Dool’s stylistic
evolution from the overtly 1980s-influenced 2019 debut self-titled album
to the more modern alternative influences of Poverty and Pop Culture. He
has played stages across Canada, most notably an opening spot for
Montreal artist Thierry Larose; made Earshot chart appearances on
various community radio stations including the national electronic top ten;
received press for his layered and highly intentional production and
arrangement; and found airplay on CBC Radio and Calgarian alternative
rock station X92.9.

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"Vanden Dool dissects this emotional limbo with surgical precision, using soundscapes as sharp as the subject matter." - Buzz Music

 

"Vanden Dool explores wider, more expansive sides to love, diving into brooding tones and lighter, synthwave moments." - Broken8Records


I Don’t Know if You Can Love Me is available on all major streaming
platforms. Tune in and dance to an aching heart.

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