B-Side Guys

Rosier found this song in an archive. Digging through written and audio collections of traditional texts from Franco-Canada and France for their album Elle veille encore, the Montreal collective kept encountering the same narrative: the fear of losing a mother, recurring across generations of folk material as if it were one of the inescapable conditions of being alive. “Plus d’amis” grows from those discoveries, which gives the song a weight that extends beyond any single songwriter’s experience.

The production reaches across a different kind of archive: the distorted guitars and slowcore atmosphere recall the shoegaze and dream-pop of the 1990s without announcing themselves as revival. Comparisons to Slowdive and Mazzy Star make sense in the texture, the way the sound drifts and thickens without quite resolving. The female-majority quintet has been working together for over a decade, with the fluency that produces, and the arrangement trusts space in a way that less experienced bands rarely manage.

Safia Nolin’s guest vocal was invited specifically because the song’s deep melancholy reminded the band of her work, and the collaboration is seamless in the way that matters: her voice doesn’t arrive as a feature. It blends with the existing vocals into something closer to a single, almost choral presence, which suits a song built from collective rather than individual grief.

Sung entirely in French, “Plus d’amis” (no more friends) holds its subject at the center without explaining it. The fear it describes was already old when the archivists found it. Rosier have simply given it a room to live in again.