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Eliza Niemi ()

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— BIO

Toronto-based artist Eliza Niemi today announced her second album, Progress Bakery, will be released March 21st, 2024 via Tin Angel Records. She also shared the album’s tender, delightfully existential lead single “Do U FM” alongside a self-directed video. “There’s a park where I grew up in Toronto that has this giant boulder in it. There’s this smooth platform on one side at the top of the rock that is cool to the touch and perfect to sit on. I used to climb up there and eat popsicles,” says Niemi of the song’s inspiration. “Years ago, the city underwent a big park revitalization project where they replaced all the wooden jungle gyms with metal and plastic ones. During this process they also moved the gigantic boulder to the other side of the park. I found this very funny and odd. It must have been so hard to do. I learned to ride a bike in that park. The feeling I get when I go there now reminds me of the smell of band class in elementary school–of spit and metal.”

The follow-up to her 2022 debut LP Staying Mellow Blows–which was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize and earned praise and support from Exclaim!, Post-Trash, and more–Progress Bakery was recorded with Louie Short, who co-produced the album along with Niemi, Jeremy Ray and Lukas Cheung (Mother Tongues). In addition to her own work as a singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist (primarily cello, as well as keys, bass, and guitar), Niemi enlisted help throughout Progress Bakery from her local community, including: drums by Evan Cartwright (Cola, Jennifer Castle, Andy Shauf); vocals by Dorothea Paas (U.S. Girls, Fucked Up); keys by Kenny Boothby (Little Kid); and percussion by Ed Squires (U.S. Girls), among others. Progress Bakery is now available for pre-order HERE. Additionally, Neimi’s own Vain Mina Records will release a limited edition cassette of the album in Canada on March 21st.

Niemi’s music is at once delicate and playful, with melodies precisely cast like stones across clear water, touching down only briefly with uncommon grace. She slip-slides through words, sounds, and images, delighting in surprise. “A few years ago I sublet an apartment during a pretty heavy time in my life, and right down the street was a spot called Progress Bakery,” she explains. “I would walk by it every day on my way to work, often get a coffee, and chew on its name all morning. I thought it was quite funny and weirdly fitting for where I was at in my life. Their sign out front is half fallen off (it says ‘gress bakery’) and their espresso is amazing–it’s like jet fuel. It embodies many juxtapositions and overall has a really warm and heartening feel.”

Across the LP, she knows to leave some questions alone and to instead let lyrical ambiguity and tension be the proof. Niemi teases out truth and meaning by asking questions. She poses two seemingly unrelated ones on standout “Do U FM,” as a rising guitar melody spiders up a scale: “What happens when your people die? Why’d they move the rock to the other side of Ulster Park?” When she admits “but I don’t know how to tell if I’m feeling it or not,” the thought surfaces through the text and is reiterated throughout the LP.

“I wanted to make an album like the bakery’s broken sign–funny, strange, warm, melancholic and hopeful, that embodied this feeling of making steady yet non-linear progress. I chose to show my process more than in my previous releases–to zoom in on little moments in my thinking about and writing of the album. Sometimes you have to dissect something to be able to understand or move through it,” she explains. Every transition, known or unknown, carries the weight of new meaning. There is a trick you can use to tell if a dough is glutinous enough: stretch it out as thin as you can without breaking it, and hold it up to the light. If you can see through it, even if it renders the world murky and uncertain, leave it alone. This is something Eliza seems to know intuitively: work gently, ask questions, and don’t always expect answers. And when you can, take a glimpse at something new, and then leave it alone.

Hi-res images, artwork, and more info HERE.

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