Wintersleep’s “In Came the Flood”

I can count on no fingers the times I’ve won something. Ok, perhaps I’m exaggerating. There’s a hazy memory lodged somewhere in my teen years of winning a CD from the local rock station (103.1 The Buzz), but the point is: it’s been a long minute.

Hence my surprise when, last July, I won two tickets to see a special pop-up performance from Wintersleep in Toronto. The occasion celebrated the re-release of their back catalogue on vinyl, and coincided with their opening for Our Lady Peace’s 30th-anniversary tour “hometown” show.

I happened to be going to that concert because, in a fit of experiential greed and the antithesis of David Foster Wallace’s 1998 essay collection title, I’d purchased tickets to the OLP Toronto show after getting back from seeing them in Montreal. It was set to take place two days before my birthday: Pure kismet, I thought. And this time I’d get to take a friend, since I’d gone to Montreal alone.

Winning tickets to a more intimate gig with Wintersleep the evening before the big amphitheater to-do was icing on the funfetti cake. Somehow, I’d gone from never seeing them live to catching three sets in one year. It was a veritable feast—an utter bounty.

The evening of the pop-up at the Dine Alone Records store, my Scottish friend Emma and I made our way east on the streetcar, spending over an hour to go five miles. That’s Toronto transit for you. Standing to the side of the crowd—one of three people masking—I spent 30 minutes listening to Wintersleep reminisce over their biggest hits, including “America,” “Weighty Ghost,” and “In Came the Flood.”

In fact, when their set kicked off with the latter, from the band’s 2012 album Hello Hum, I felt something long-asleep in me stir awake. After retreating to small-town living in the Hudson Valley, accepting a kind of withdrawal that felt necessary to keep from being reinfected with covid and further degrading my fragile baseline, a long-muted pulse somewhere in my being began to thrum with more volume.

Hearing Loel Campbell’s drumming in such a cozy setting only increased the insistence of that susurration. Campbell, as I like to joke, is my rhythm blood brother. His playing strikes the most fascinating balance of muscular athleticism and poetic phrasing. A song like “In Came the Flood” launches with a propulsive beat before pausing for delicately crafted fills. He’s easily my favorite contemporary drummer. I left the gig feeling slightly more connected to the vibrancy of being alive.

Cut to nearly a year later and I happened to be back in Toronto the same week Wintersleep were releasing their first new album in seven years, Wishing Moon. (I’d booked the trip before their announcement, and caught the universe slyly winking, as it often does if you’re paying attention.) That Friday, I once again boarded the 501 streetcar and made the long trek across town to purchase the album on vinyl at Dine Alone. This time, instead of an hour, it took me 90 minutes each way, but I used the time to sink into their new music as I watched Toronto slowly crawl by.

I’d enjoyed the three songs I’d heard in the lead-up, but nothing really gripped me. It turned out to be the difference between a lead single—the nature of which requires a track to stand apart from the context surrounding it—and the benefit of hearing an album unfurl from beginning to end, like climbing to a higher vantage point to admire the full force of a breathtaking view. I couldn’t get over what they’d accomplished on Wishing Moon. Every listen revealed a new gem: First “After You,” then “Abyss,” then “Redrawn.”

Once I got back to the Hudson Valley, it became “Gale,” my eyes unexpectedly pricking with tears when Paul Murphy’s voice rose and fell on the chorus as if, like the sea, it had been stirred by the strong wind at the song’s center. The chorus is such a simple, stark phrase, “Then came a gale and blew it all away,” but he sings that line against a punctuating wave of rhythm that infuses the meter with greater poignancy.

I heard in that force all that had been blown away from my life over the past four years. But for the first time in a long time, I felt as though I were standing on the other side of the storm. As much as I either railed against or hid from the tempest, I can see now—from the high vantage of hindsight—how it was clearing space to accommodate the way I was quietly growing. I had survived—not necessarily intact, but neither as hollowed out as I once thought. New tendrils were starting to sprout.