Spring Colours spent six years building toward this record the slow way, a self-titled EP in 2020, a pandemic delay, a second EP called Loom in 2023, a run of southern Ontario shows opening for bands like Sparta and Frail Body, before finally cutting a debut LP in January 2025 at Toronto’s Dreamhouse Studios. The Courage Cloak sounds like a band that earned the right to stop hedging. Lukas Lyjak has described the album’s central image directly: a red, angry cloak people put on to perform strength while hiding a plainer need for actual connection underneath it. What makes the record work is that the band doesn’t just state that idea once and move on. They build an entire vocabulary of armor, out of stone, steel, bone, and thread, and then spend ten songs watching it fail to hold.
“In the Jaws of Home” opens the record already mid-transformation, a narrator trying to turn to stone, “grey and cold,” so other people’s judgment can’t land, before admitting the strategy leaves marks anyway: “that marks of the gargoyles, they’re still a part of me.” The church imagery running underneath it, whispers bouncing off “aisle, pew, and casket,” collection baskets overflowing while the actual grief gets buried in the garden, gives the armor a specific cause: protection built against religious weight rather than vulnerability in general.
“Armour Trading” makes the album’s whole metaphor literal, swapping a bedsheet for steel plate and asking what happens when two people arm themselves against each other inside the same relationship. The word choice does real work here: “no panoply,” using the specific term for a full suit of armor rather than a vaguer stand-in, and landing on a question the song never fully answers, why keep building defenses against someone already on your side. “Bracelet Song” supplies the record’s other recurring image, lives strung together like beads on a chain, and that pendulum swing described in its opening lines, watching someone teeter on a swing set, returns two tracks later as the title of the album’s instrumental breather, “A Brief Moment in the Great Pendulum,” a structural callback that rewards close listening more than casual replay.
“I’ll Be a Moon to You” swaps armor for orbit, a narrator who first promises to be a ghost, present but unreachable, before revising the offer to something with actual gravity: a moon, reflecting light it doesn’t generate, pulled into someone else’s rotation by force rather than choice. “Femur in the Dust” earns its hooks through a pun as dark as it is efficient, “I’m a femur in the dust, humerus beside oneself,” anatomy standing in for both physical exhaustion and gallows humor in the same breath. “I Saw a Spider” turns the record’s watchfulness inward, three rings on the spider standing for power, cowardice, and shame, before the narrator realizes the spider isn’t an outside threat at all: “now I’m that spider, I’m the space between the lines.” The mundane domestic imagery that follows, wiping counters, fluffing pillows, plays as someone finally learning to sit still inside an ordinary moment instead of guarding it, rather than another form of avoidance.
Closer “Courage Cloak” collects every image the record has built and forces a choice. The title track’s cleverest line pairs biblical and acoustic registers in the same breath, “if you’re the lamb’s rising call, then me I’m the infinite Shepherd’s Tone,” pulling double duty as both a shepherd tending a flock and a Shepard tone, the audio illusion of a pitch that seems to climb forever without ever actually arriving anywhere higher. That’s exactly the trap the song describes, a rise with no ceiling and no real destination, kept aloft by an audience rather than by anything internal. The record’s actual resolution comes quietly, almost embarrassed by itself: choosing a smaller, quieter life over the endless climb, “not more than what we’ve gotten.”
Genre labels like fifth-wave emo and chiptune noise-pop describe the record’s surface accurately enough, effects-heavy guitars, nostalgic synth textures, hooks sturdy enough to survive a DIY room. But The Courage Cloak earns its title through the writing underneath that surface, a band spending ten songs building armor out of stone and steel and starlight, then finding the nerve to take all of it back off in front of an audience.
The Courage Cloak is available now.
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