Junior (LP)

Corridor are a group from Montreal. The rock'n'roll band had barely inked their record deal when they surfed into studio, racing against time to make the most dazzling, immediate and inventive album of their young career: 39 minutes of darting and dodging guitars, spiralling vocal harmonies, and the complicated, goldenrod nostalgia of a Sunday mid-afternoon.

This isn't Corridor's first rodeo. Junior is the band's third full-length and their third recorded with their friend, producer (and occasionally roommate) Emmanuel Ethier. 2015's Le Voyage Éternel and 2017's Supermercado were made languorously, their songs taking shape across whole seasons. This time Dominic Berthiaume (vocals/bass), Julian Perreault (guitar), Jonathan Robert (vocals/guitar/synths), and Julien Bakvis (drums) permitted themselves no such indulgence.

Singers, two guitars, bass, drums: the timelessness of the setup underpins the timelessness of the sound, a rock'n'roll borrowing from each of the past six decades - punk and pop, psych and jangle, daydream and swoon. This is music that's muscular, exciting and full of love, its riffs a kind of medicine. Whereas Corridor's past work could sometimes seem overstuffed, twenty ideas to the same song, the new work is hypnotic, distilled.

Sub Pop have never before, in their 33-year history, signed a Francophone act.