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For Immediate Release:
May 27, 2026
KNITTING RUMINATE ON DEATH AND LEGACY IN
“I WASN’T FULLY COOKED” - LISTEN
OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO EXPLORES THE MOMENTS
BEFORE EVERYTHING CHANGES - WATCH
EPHEMERAL SLACKER ROCK REIGNS ON ALBUM SOUVENIR
OUT JUNE 26, 2026, VIA MINT RECORDS - PRE-SAVE
MONTREAL BAND FOLLOW UP THEIR
BUZZY 2024 DEBUT SOME KIND OF HEAVEN
ANNOUNCE CANADIAN TOUR DATES TO CELEBRATE RECORD RELEASE
FORTHCOMING ALBUM WEAVES TOGETHER
MEMORY AND EXISTENTIAL DREAD
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Photo Credit: Celeste Midori // Download High-Res Photo HERE
“While their debut leaned into a hazy, grungy cohesion, this record expands their sound — introducing more experimentation with texture, synths, and structure while keeping that introspective core intact.” — EXCLAIM
“Souvenir sees knitting expand on the slacker rock sound established on Some Kind of Heaven with more depth, having drawn inspiration from the diversity of Montreal's DIY scene.”
— THE LINE OF BEST FIT
“We named knitting a Band To Watch back in 2024, coinciding with the release of their excellent debut full-length Some Kind Of Heaven. Today the Montreal indie rockers have announced its follow-up Souvenir, which they're teasing with the brooding, lightly grungy lead single ‘I Want To Remember Everything.’”
— STEREOGUM
“A wonderful band”
— NARDWUAR
Montreal band knitting are excited to share “I Wasn’t Fully Cooked,” ahead of their forthcoming album Souvenir, out June 26, 2026 via Vancouver’s Mint Records. The song reflects on what it means to be known and remembered, stemming from a fear of unexpectedly dying before sharing something vital about yourself. Mischa Dempsey, the band's front person, explains: "I was on tour in early 2020 and got really scared that I would die in a freak accident and would be mourned as a girl, as my old name (this fear was eventually a big impetus for me coming out to people as non-binary and changing my name). ‘I Wasn’t Fully Cooked’ was a way for me to think about what death interrupts and what gets remembered…It might be our favourite knitting song yet." In knitting’s deft hands, the song sounds heavy and airy at the same time. Filled with the tension and intensity of the subject matter, it also has the open feeling of friends jamming—which is, of course, how the song came to life musically.
The official music video, directed by Sasha Khalimonova, stars Celia Green, a performance artist out of Toronto, and Alex Mona Al Refai Al Jandali. The scenes jump back and forth between the two, building a sense of dread that pushes and pulls and gnaws at you as the song plays on. Each scene flashes with movement, creating one long ever-shifting dance. Khalimonova says, “I was thinking about moments in our life that freeze, the couple of seconds right before impact that always feel like they last forever. My goal with the video was to communicate that looming, ambient sense of unease, and reference the halting and stalling of these impact-moments by the use of super-slow-motion throughout the video."
WATCH “I WASN’T FULLY COOKED” OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO
LISTEN TO “I WASN’T FULLY COOKED”
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Photo Credit: Celeste Midori // Download High-Res Photo HERE
Earlier this spring, the band announced Souvenir—which in French translates directly to "to remember." The record considers what we take with us in life—each song feels like opening a locket and looking onto a specific moment or memory, a world of feeling held in a few moments. They announced the album with the release of “I Want To Remember Everything,” a track about having been a weird kid, and trying to reconnect as an adult with all the parts of yourself you tried to deny in order to fit in. It’s a striking track that gets into your soft spots, while still finding an ease in its chiming chords and driving, focused guitars. It makes for a keenly empathetic listening experience, close to the surface without feeling overly tender.
“‘I Want to Remember Everything’ was one of the first songs that really came together for the album,” says Dempsey. “It draws inspiration from the movies, music and TV that made me feel really seen as a kid, but that maybe my friends weren’t so into. My dad had a lot of random songs and music videos on our family computer that he’d downloaded from Limewire, one of them being a fan video edit of a Linkin Park song that me and my siblings would watch on repeat. That was a big inspiration for the overall feel of this song, along with the 1996 movie ‘Harriet the Spy’. ‘I Want to Remember Everything’ is a love letter to the weirdo I was when I was a kid, and as a way to try to reconnect with the parts of myself I hid away as I was growing up.”
The video is a campy, whimsical visual in which the band tries to track down a treasured missing object against the intense brutalist backdrop of Montreal in the winter. It takes a playful yet wistful approach, entering an imaginative world that has one foot in childhood and one in adulthood, and highlights the undeniable, guitar-forward catchiness of the track.
WATCH “I WANT TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING” MUSIC VIDEO
LISTEN TO “I WANT TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING”
Last month, they released “Here Comes,” along with a dreamy, nostalgia-laced music video. The song moves towards an unclear destination, with the sort of straightforward fearlessness that comes from feeling both not enough and way too much. And yet, an unnerving uncertainty remains. “I’ve made myself too many promises / When will I realize I’m not built for this? / So I could try to wake / At the same time every day / Make my bed, meditate / What a wash, what a waste / To be sweet but have no taste / Nothing round the decay,” sings front person Mischa Dempsey. It’s a laundry list of things to complete to supposedly help get one's life in better shape—but by what definition? Or whose? “Lyrically, the song plays around with the push and pull between trying to keep your head above water, and wanting to give up on that and just have fun,” says Dempsey. “Above all, it’s about knowing the period of recklessness in your early 20s has an expiration date, and seeing just how long you can push it.”
WATCH “HERE COMES” OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO
LISTEN TO “HERE COMES”
As with the rest of the album, this track was recorded and produced in-house, fully engineered by guitarist Sarah Harris and with the rest of the band contributing bits and pieces to the production. For “Here Comes,” Dempsey commented, “‘Here Comes’ was the working title for this song, because the lead riff in the verse felt like it was in anticipation of something. I brought it to the band; we built the chorus and bridge in our jamspace, and then ended up restructuring the whole thing in the studio. I came to record vocals with only the chorus finished, and me and Sarah came up with the rest on the spot.” Free of typical recording studio schedule restrictions, songs were built on instinct and in the moment, culminating in a record that feels entirely true to the band that made it.
After meeting on the Montreal DIY scene, knitting released their debut full-length Some Kind of Heaven in 2024 to great acclaim, a record with unflinching lyrics, gauzy sonic layers and brooding guitars. It garnered praise from Stereogum, FLOOD Magazine, Pitchfork, and even Nardwuar. In Canada and beyond, they've played with bands like Wishy, Preoccupations, Ribbon Skirt, and Wild Pink. To celebrate the release of the record, they are announcing a spate of shows in Canada coming up—see below and connect with them on Instagram at @knitting_band.
KNITTING LIVE 2026
JUNE
19 – Calgary, AB – Pin Bar (Sled Island)
20 – Calgary, AB – Eighty Eight Brewing (Sled Island)
JULY
9 – Montreal, QC – La Sala Rossa
10 – Ottawa, ON – FONO
11 – Peterborough, ON – Sadleir House
22 – Hamilton, ON – Ooey Gooey’s
23 – Toronto, ON – Dina’s Tavern
24 – London, ON – Honey Dip
25 - West Nipissing, ON - River & Sky Camping & Music Festival
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KNITTING
SOUVENIR
MINT RECORDS
Release date: June 26, 2026
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Download High-Res Album Art
1. I Want To Remember Everything
2. Sunrise
3. Here Comes
4. Photocopy
5. I Wasn’t Fully Cooked
6. Shuffle
7. Gift Horse
8. Sequel
9. Exit Desire
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ABOUT KNITTING:
After enthralling guitar fiends with their tight yet confessional 2024 debut album Some Kind of Heaven, knitting didn’t have to retreat for very long before they had an entirely new album on their hands. Souvenir is the product of frontperson Mischa Dempsey’s existential musings, dreamed up in what little downtime they had between their debut album cycle, world tours, plus appearances at SXSW and New Colossus Festival. Dempsey constructed the skeletons of each song on Souvenir, while guitarist/engineer Sarah Harris (Ultra Far), bassist Piper Curtis (Sunforger), and drummer Andy Mulcair (Andy and the Dannys, Lovelet) brought the songs to life over brief but productive studio sessions in St. John’s, NL and Montreal, QC. After extensive collaboration over the past two years on writing, recording, and touring, learning how to make that collaboration work its magic, knitting crafted Souvenir into a properly introspective sonic experience.
In the two years since knitting introduced themselves on Some Kind of Heaven, the fledgling band has, in a sense, grown up. As level-headed as the Canadian band may be, owing to their decade-plus of DIY experience, the highs and lows of completing, releasing, and promoting a debut indie rock album showed the band what they can control themselves and what’s out of their hands. While the band’s earliest performances showed strength, owing to each member’s teenage years spent learning how to be good bandmates, they were a little green when it came to releasing professionally. You have to be green to dive head-first like they did. Some Kind of Heaven sports a consistently ’gazey, grungy slacker rock aesthetic, earning comparisons ranging from DIIV to Hole to Alex G, jumping between songs discussing everything from trans identity to domestic doldrums. Eager audiences across North America and Europe responded right away. In 2026, knitting is a little more seasoned, less interested in making a big splash as they are in honing their craft and pushing their creative limits. The resurgent Montreal DIY scene is a consistent source of inspiration for the band, and they wanted the scene’s sonic diversity to be reflected on their next album. For Souvenir, their sonic palette has the same centerpiece but far more breadth, while every song has an introspective, existential backbone. It’s an inversion of Some Kind of Heaven’s aesthetically tight narrative bricolage. The album came together over studio sessions in Dempsey & Mulcair’s home of Montreal, Quebec, and Harris’ home of St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.
As knitting has grown from a lockdown experiment into a working band, each member has expanded their skill sets, allowing the band to accomplish more on their own or within their web of friendships. They didn’t rehearse much before holing up in the studio, owing to their cramped schedule, so Dempsey’s germinal ideas needed the rest of the band’s unique perspectives to usher final drafts and recordings into something fruitful. Mulcair’s drumming is more intricate and full of surprises; Harris taking the engineer’s helm meant the band didn’t have to translate their unique internal language to a third party. As the songs on Souvenir were primarily produced in Harris' studio, the tracks benefited from more extensive experiments with the drum machines and synthesizers that studio-mates had lying around. Their occasional prominence speaks to an eagerness to grow beyond the strictures of a rock band format. The band’s dear friend Rhys Climenhage took charge of the mixing, owing to knitting’s increased belief that tapping your network’s talent leads to a better final product than pursuing so-called prestige outside, since even the finest engineers can’t approximate what your friends can intuit from years of casual rapport. Souvenir sounds introspective and even woeful, but it listens like something more relaxed: you can hear the mutual understanding between every performer, each using their individual talents to help translate nuanced or hard-to-verbalize sensations. There’s nothing more satisfying than hearing a band find their groove and revel in it.
Today, knitting is Montreal-based Mischa Dempsey, Andy Mulcair, and St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador-based Sarah Harris. Their sophomore album, Souvenir, is out June 26th on Mint Records.
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