mobarrymusic

Road, sky, and cold, cold water: Monique Barry’s new album HAAK is a transcendent, 7-year journey through elements, and emotions 

Good things take time, great things take a little longer, goes the saying. That couldn’t be more true of Monique Barry’s 5th album, HAAK, which saw its official release on vinyl and Bandcamp on June 20, 2024 and to all streaming platforms September 6th, 2024.

Barry’s concept for HAAK (an acronym for High as a Kite) which she began in 2016, was to embody the passage from idealism to experience in real time by releasing a series of singles as she wrote them, and ordering them in the same way on the final album. 

Admittedly, she did not expect that process to take seven years. 

And yet the emotional journey that we go on with the singer and keyboardist – whose trademark ethereal vocals have inspired comparisons with Cocteau Twins, Laurie Anderson, and Róisín Murphy, and whose unclassifiable style encompasses genres as diverse as dreampop, Krautrock, ambient, disco-punk, folk, rock, classical, and techno-pop – is all the richer and more profound because of it. 

Each of HAAK’s lyrically minimal but sonically lavish tracks is a musical odyssey unto itself, beginning with the first, Open Road, an exuberant, crescendo-ing ode to the road trip. There are traces of that positivity in Side A’s remaining four tracks – Freedom, New Eyes, Dance, and Coyote – but we also feel a sense of ominousness creeping in.

Side B – written during the pandemic, and while Barry was grappling with the death of a parent – moves us into more overtly somber territory. “Time heals all things/Time heals/Know that it’s true” Barry repeatedly intones in the atmospheric Time, as if trying to convince herself. In the driving, danceable Courage, meanwhile, “Fear is a captor/Inventing disaster.”

In 2021, while dealing with loss and anxiety, Barry began taking daily cold dips in Lake Ontario near her home in Toronto. The practice, which she does year round, transformed her, and, by extension, the HAAK project itself.

That influence is most apparent in HAAK’s intimate final track, Lake Shanty, a celebration of Barry’s passion for cold-water swimming inspired by the “little songs” of Irving Berlin and Noel Coward. (Its mesmerizing video features Barry calmly floating in a frigid, sun-dappled lake in February.) The track also brings us back full circle: to a place of serenity, hope and wonder. Despite the “inclement weather” above her, Barry finds “Beauty in the darkness/Giving me space to breathe.”  

Barry’s description of cold-water swimming mirrors the experience of listening to HAAK: “The extremity of it sometimes demands patience,” she says. “But it's also beautiful, with all the colours, textures, and depths in the water. It allows one to see a seemingly ugly, gray day with new eyes. When I leave the water everything is clearer, more hopeful, more doable, less dramatic. The experience allows me to calmly approach the rest of my day.”

Eight of the album’s ten tracks have previously been released. Two songs, Courage, and the wistful Better Times, will get their release with HAAK.

HAAK personnel include Michael Wojewoda on drums (who also mixed and co-produced the album), Alisdair Jones on bass, Marc Meriläinen and Kevin Lacroix on guitar, Terrence O'Brien on ambient guitar and Emma Campbell on backing vocals.

For more information, contact: mobarrymusic@gmail.com