About
Broken Social Scene operates less like a band and more like a rolling collective, pulling in anywhere from six to nineteen members at a time. Formed in Toronto by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning in 1999, the group grew out of a need for voices: their early material was almost entirely instrumental, so they started recruiting friends from the city's indie scene, eventually folding in members of Metric, Feist, Stars, and Do Make Say Think, among others. The result is a sound built on grand orchestrations of guitars, horns, woodwinds, and violins, with unusual song structures and an experimental production style that somehow holds it all together. Their 2002 album You Forgot It in People is widely considered a landmark, winning the Juno for Alternative Album of the Year and spawning tracks like "Lover's Spit" that kept popping up in films and TV shows for years afterward. Their self titled 2005 follow up won the same award. Six studio albums in total, the latest being Remember the Humans, and Pitchfork named them among the most important artists of the last 25 years.
