The Beaches are embracing reinvention, with a darker sound, fresh hairdos, and a new single, 'Jocelyn' — all while shaking off the "Canadian curse" and conquering new horizons. Check out the latest cover story for our New Music Friday playlist edit, PLAY.

Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Patrick Gunning.

Perhaps the best indicator of any artist's new era is a new hairdo, so naturally, Jordan Miller, leader of Canadian rock outfit The Beaches, has turned up for the band's Reading Festival debut with a fresh set of extensions and a darker dye job. The change came just before the four-piece headlined their biggest-ever show, a hometown stop at the 16,000 cap Budweiser Stage in Toronto, the day before jetting across the Atlantic for a sold-out UK run. But the band's reinvention extends further back than a hair change.

Almost exactly a year ago, they released their second album 'Blame My Ex', which catapulted them beyond Canada's borders with its lead single 'Blame Brett', a tongue-in-cheek breakup banger about badly navigating the dating world and becoming a bit of an arse after a nasty split.

"Oh, our lives have completely changed for the better, obviously," says Kylie Miller, guitarist and sister of Jordan (who can't chat today because she's on vocal rest). "People around the world, not just the country that we're from, started listening to our music and discovering our band, and it's been an absolute trip."

'Blame Brett' and their real breakthrough came six years after their debut album 'Late Show', which was released in 2017 when they were a very different band. 'Late Show' lived in the world of early-2000s garage-rock, borrowing sounds from female-fronted bands of the era like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Metric, with a dusting of bluesier tones from bands like The Black Keys. Several musical forays later, and 'Blame My Ex' hung onto The Beaches' early ferocity and cleaned up the influences to create something janglier, leaning towards 80s British indie and resembling something more like The Smiths, The Cure and The Stone Roses.