sundayclub

Formed in the stillness outside Winnipeg, the duo of Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre, together known as sundayclub, craft music with painstaking care, blurring dreamlike nostalgia with restless introspection. The "laborious" process requires constant edits and considerable time, but there's no denying the compelling power of a song's final form.

With the release of a new EP, Bannatyne, the members of sundayclub spoke with us about the pressure of living with songs for years and why the next chapter has already quietly begun.

Analogue: Before sundayclub, what was music for each of you? Were you already making music together or separately?.

Courtney Carmichael: It was separate.

Nikki St. Pierre: I started when I was eight. I found a guitar in my closet and just immediately went, ‘This is what I want to do.’ I taught myself how to play, and from there, I played a lot of metal and punk. Being from Winnipeg, there’s so much of that here. Propagandhi is from here. It’s big in the culture. Then EDM started happening, I heard Skrillex, and I went, ‘What is this?’ That led me into more studio stuff and taking on production, and once that craze kind of died off, I really focused in on production and bands.

Courtney: Yeah, your story started very internal with music, whereas mine was the complete opposite. It was all external: taking guitar lessons with the intention of playing in a local polka band or busking. [Laughs]

I started busking around 16 with my sister, and then we got into the young performers program at the Winnipeg Folk Festival. We needed someone to produce our demos. They were not good, I will say, but we we got in and it was because of him helping us record our stuff. That helped us start making music at a higher level.

Nikki: So, that’s how we ended up at sundayclub. Her sister stopped making folk music, and we started making indie music when the pandemic happened.

Courtney: Yeah, we had that space to grow and figure out what we wanted to be.

Analogue: Were you quick to land on the sound you have now? You’ve built this sort of atmosphere or your own world here.

Nikki: No, definitely not quick, but I remember the moment when it happened. We were writing a song that has yet to be announced. You came up with this riff and went, ‘Whoa, this is cool!’ Everything snowballed from there. But the year, year and a half before that was just us grinding.

Courtney: Yeah, a rather laborious process. We kept thinking we were on the right path, and then a new influence would slip in during the pandemic. It was like a music exploration period where we were overwhelmed with the amount of influences. We were going back and forth on what we wanted to sound like. It took until that riff.

Analogue: That word ‘laborious’ suggests it may not have been fun. Is that true? That’s interesting that you had a commitment to something that wasn’t fun, if that’s the case.

Nikki: We’re weirdly serious about a lot of things, and that was one of them from the beginning. It wasn’t, ‘This is going to be a project to try to get signed.’ It was just whatever we’re doing in the moment, we take seriously.

Courtney: Yeah.

Nikki: And I think that seriousness pulled out some not-fun aspects.

Courtney: I also think that’s where the melancholy comes from. There was so much incertitude as we figured out what we wanted to sound like, and that seeped into the music. I was very vulnerable during the pandemic. No social interaction. We live outside the nearest major city. It was a quietly vulnerable time. That’s a huge theme of the first record. I don’t know if we’ll ever get that again.

Nikki: There was nothing to distract you from looking into yourself. You had no choice but to face what you were doing in such a raw way.

Analogue: Do you think the sound is tied to that moment in time? Will it be hard to access that again?

Nikki: No, I think we’ll be okay. It was important to the development.

Courtney: Yes.

Nikki: It helped us figure out how to access that place.

Courtney: And I think I’ll always find that place. I’ll always find something to worry about or something I think is traumatic, even if it isn’t. [Laughs] But I do want to have fun. Our goal for the next record is to go to places we didn’t touch the first time—maybe more fast-paced songs, or different emotional terrains. We’re figuring that out right now.

Analogue: Does the song creation process mirror that long development? Like going from spark to finished product. Is that also laborious?

Nikki: It is, especially on this EP. “Bannatyne” took us three years.

Courtney: That was the hardest song out of the collection by far.

Nikki: We just wouldn’t let it go.

Courtney: We were at the point of, ’Is this necessary?’ It started as a voice memo on a crappy GarageBand beat in 2021, and the fact that we dragged it to June or July of 2024—that’s when we finished the record—is wild.

Nikki: A lot of bands we meet don’t drag songs out this long. And we’re like, ‘Okay, is it us? Are we unnecessary? Are we in the minutiae?’ But you’ve got to find the thing.

Courtney: That spark, that initial moment. Then you build the core vibe. From a production standpoint, you have to find what that is and then take those two things and shape a final song that holds it all. That sometimes takes a lot of work.

Nikki: I can think of maybe two songs we didn’t make multiple times.

Analogue: You’re one week from release. You’ve lived with this so long. What are the emotions right now?

Courtney: I’m ready for it to be out. Ready to see these songs in the world. And ready to keep moving.

Nikki: It’s weird. Being our first release, we’ve lived with these songs so long, and now they deserve our full attention once they’re out. But creatively, you want to keep creating. It’s a strange tension.

Analogue: Then tell me: what’s coming next? What has your creative attention now, and how will you be supporting the EP once it’s out?

Nikki: Serving and supporting is going to be pushing on socials, playing them live, doing different live versions. We need fun. These songs were made seriously. Live needs to feel different.

Courtney: And slowly at the top of next year, we’ll release other stuff. I don’t think we can talk about it yet.

Nikki: But stay tuned. The EP was once a larger collection. We split it. These songs lived together. The rest lived together. It made more sense that way.

Analogue: So this is the beginning. The machine is rolling now. The labor was worth it.

Courtney: It’s kind of insane.

Nikki: Yeah. And we’re already creating again. Our management says we don’t need to. We’re like, ‘Trust me, we do.’ [Laughs]

VISIT: sundayclub

Photo: Nikki St. Pierre