Nova Scotia dreamy noise-pop rockers Kestrels are gearing up to release their fifth full length LP titled "Better Wonder" on February 14, 2025 via Darla Records. The album will contain 12 brand new tracks of the melodic, distortion and reverb fueled dreamy shoegaze with big melodic hooks and emotional depth, produced by John Angello who also produced their last album Dream or Don't Dream .

Peck started working on the songs that would become Kestrels’ fifth album almost a decade ago; half of the tracks came from a scrapped solo album. He began composing in earnest, though, in the spring of 2021, secreted away in his house in the country. “It’s a nighttime record riddled with anxiety written during a weird time,” he says. “I had lived alone in the woods most of my adult life and I loved that lifestyle in a lot of ways. But during that time period there was so much change and tumult and those feelings of insanity at three in the morning. I was trying to capture it in a murky, uncomfortable sound."

“I made specific sonic choices to reflect that conceptual time of night, including mixing almost entirely analog with Angello,” he adds. “It was my attempt to take the familiar and make it unfamiliar and new.”

The result is a woozy, disorienting suite of tracks, like finding a secret station between channels on a late-night drive. Take album-opener Lilys, which barnstorms in on a sea of percussion and swirling guitars as the protagonist wrestles with the concept of holding on to someone without letting them know they’re clinging. “It’s a treatise on how two incompatible ideas can coexist to make something work,” Peck says. Alex Edkins from Weird Nightmare sings on that track — hearing an early version of the track, he told Peck it was "screaming for a harmony". “Dream of You in Black” skulks in next, a synthed-out Robert Smith-style love song to a fictional goth girl. “It’s about the anxieties of waiting to see how a relationship plays out and the machine for fictions your brain can become in those situations,” Peck says. Next, “Float Alone” taps into Peck’s love for Dinosaur Jr, a very Nineties washed-out song with ripping guitars and big open chords put through old flangers. “It puts the ‘self’ in self-fulfilling prophecies,” Peck quips.

And then there’s the gorgeous, lush interlude “A Thousand Bare Diamonds,” titled after a bit of Magnetic Poetry written by Peck’s partner, Norma MacDonald, who also sings on the album. That tiny track serves as a reprise before we sail into “Sleepless,” which sees Peck merging his love of My Bloody Valentine with Brian Wilson — see instrumental motifs ala Pet Sounds amid waves of sound. “This song has a lot going on musically — listen closely,” he says. “Lyrically it's pretty straightforward: I am losing it a little bit in quiet and private ways.”

“It Would” also taps into Peck’s Beach Boys adoration, pulling chords from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and injecting them with a heavy dose of late-Eighties indie rock. For this track, he painted his studio black to really sink into the corners of the song “It was a weird time!” he says, laughing. "Those lyrics, ‘Escaping inside,’ ’Show your darkness to me’ — that's a good summation of how I was feeling at the time.” “Sunflower” blooms out of the darkness next, boasting five-part harmonies and acting as a break from the gloom — before we’re tossed back into the unknown with “Free Forever.” “This song is the weird mirror image of ‘Dream of You in Black,’ Peck says. “The uncertainty harnessed.”

The jagged “Nightlife” is perhaps the hardest-edge track on the record. And with good reason; it’s based on a 2020 Canadian mass shooting in which Peck lost people he loved. “I think of this now as my ‘fuck you’ to the desire to order and narrativize everything for our own comforts,” he says. “Sometimes horror happens and its echoes don't follow easy paths.” “Interstellar” continues in that chaotic vein, a blur of a song composed on a wonky guitar Peck’s friend built for him. “There's a real energy in the song that underpins the unsettling feelings in the track,” he says.

Joyce comes in swinging with the almost gentle “Nausicaa,” named for a chapter in Ulysses in which twilight gathers as the day winds down. “It's about loneliness, history, and love,” Peck says. Blending 12-string guitars, synths, and vocals from Alex Gehring (Ringo Deathstarr) the song finds Peck’s psyche laid bare. “I read something once about how identity is actually found in the tension between who you are and who you want to be, which makes a lot of sense to me,” he says.

“Total Bummer” brings us back to the beginning in a sense, answering the question in opener “Lilys” — "Will you meet me alone?" — with the statement: "Meet me in the dark.” The night has been long, but it’s not over — and that’s not necessarily bad. Give into the gloom.

Check out the singles below and make sure to pre-order the album if you like what you hear.

RIYL: Hotline TNT, Dinosaur Jr, Alvvays, Turnover, Ride