2020-present

The New Pornographers on The Former Site Of, Canadian Indie Rock, and Making Music From Grief

Broken Record Podcast · Jun 9, 2026 · published to YouTube

The New Pornographers have never been easy to pin down. Since forming in Vancouver in the late ’90s, the band became one of the defining acts of the Canadian indie rock explosion. They’re part of a scene that also produced Neko Case, Dan Bejar, and a generation of artists who seemed to operate entirely outside the commercial mainstream. Co-founders Carl Newman and Kathryn Calder have spent more than two decades making records that sound like they arrived fully formed: densely layered, relentlessly melodic, and somehow both euphoric and melancholy at the same time. Their latest album, The Former Site Of,  draws on a different kind of raw material. Part of it came from a friend’s terminal illness and the weight of watching someone you love reckon with time running out. Part of it came from something more unexpected: the last remaining payphone in New York City, which became a kind of anch

Video is hosted and played by YouTube and published by Broken Record Podcast. CULTUR indexes metadata and context; it does not host, re-upload or strip advertising.