Population II tick all the boxes for a proper prog-rock act. They can easily fill an entire album side with a single track. Their drummer is also their lead singer. The guitarist and bassist double as synth players. And they hail from Quebec, historically the proggiest of all Canadian provinces. But approached from a different vantage, the Montreal trio is also a prototypical garage-rock band, fueled by maniacal energy, blistering fuzz, and a belief in raw power over precision. Their collision of prog excess and punk attitude made them a perfect fit for John Dwyer’s Castle Face label, which released Population II’s first proper album, À la Ô Terre, in 2020. But like Ty Segall and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard before them, Population II used their early Castle Face connection as a springboard to launch themselves on their own unpredictable trajectory.
With their third album, Maintenant Jamais, Population II confront an existential quandary: Are you still a prog band if all your songs are under five minutes? “We tried to make our songs catchier,” drummer-vocalist Pierre-Luc Gratton recently admitted to Montreal’s Le Devoir. “For this album, we wondered how to play these strange notes without sounding like we spend our lives on Quebec-prog discussion forums.” But where ’70s forebears like Pink Floyd and Rush shrewdly compartmentalized their multi-sectional suites and radio-friendly singles, Population II delight in blurring the line between artful ambition and untamed abandon. Produced with Marie Davidson associate Dominic Vanchesteing, Maintenant Jamais foregrounds sharper melodies, lusher textures, and tighter grooves, but retains the fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants philosophy that guided the band’s previous voyages to the heart of the sun.
For Population II, a pop hook is just that: a sharp implement they can use to drag you wherever they want to go. Where Gratton once had to wail wildly over his band’s interstellar overdrive, Maintenant Jamais sees him comfortably settle into the Lennon-esque elocution favored by the likes of post-Manipulator Ty Segall and pre-Currents Kevin Parker. (The lysergic riffs and cascading momentum of “homme étoilé” provide a particularly potent flashback of a time when Tame Impala were essentially a Dungen tribute act.) But Population II aren’t as interested in crafting pop songs as building Trojan horses: The breathy melody and cool Virgin Suicides atmosphere of “Prévisions” lure you unsuspectingly into a stormy psychedelic squall courtesy of guitarist Tristan Lacombe, while “Mariano (Jamais je ne t’oublierai)” counters its hip-shaking synth-funk beat with skull-splitting blasts of wah-wah and keyboard drone that overtake the song like a white splotch devouring a melting film strip.
But even as it pits sensory-obliterating noise against starry-eyed melody, Maintenant Jamais exhibits a finesse that makes even the most jarring juxtapositions feel naturally fluid. When the loose psych-jazz swing of “Le thé est prêt” suddenly locks into a taut funk-rock strut, it feels like one of those oddly satisfying reversed videos where a spilled mess instantly gets sucked back into a tidy container. Those sorts of surprise structural shifts lend Maintenant Jamais a rolling momentum that ultimately makes track divisions immaterial. Appearing midway through the album is a trio of songs—the strobe-lit psych assault of “La Trippance,” the sci-fi synth soliloquy “Poudreuse Blues,” and Sébastien Provençal’s motorik bass-popping showcase “i + i”—that feel like complementary pieces of an elaborate puzzle, a theory confirmed by Maintenant Jamais’ short-film companion Carillon, where the band performs the tracks as a seamless triptych.
Coincidentally, Maintenant Jamais arrives just a few weeks before a 4K IMAX restoration of Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii hits theaters, and Carillon (directed by Vanchesteing) is essentially Population II’s version of that cult classic, shot with a camera slowly panning around the band as it performs outdoors. Except instead of a world-famous rock group staging a ritualistic spectacle on a mythic historical site, we see a DIY outfit setting up shop on a desolate, brutalist concrete structure in small-town Quebec. More than just pay visual tribute to a foundational piece of stoner cinema, Carillon does for its architectural setting what Maintenant Jamais does for prog rock itself: It revitalizes a grand old institution with an insurrectionary spirit.
