Nine years is a long time to wait, and Broken Social Scene spent most of it reminding everyone why they were waiting. The You Forgot It in People anniversary tour, the documentary, the collective goodwill – all of it meant Remember the Humans arrived carrying more than any album was likely to justify.
The smart thing the album does is not try. It’s shorter than you’d expect, more intimate, more like a conversation between old friends than a statement. Kevin Drew lost his mother during recording. The band has lost friends, lost parents, reached the stage where the question isn’t what’s next but what it all meant.
David Newfeld produced You Forgot It in People and the 2005 self-titled record before disappearing for two decades. Getting him back was the album’s most significant decision and it pays off. His production style hasn’t changed much: voices layered over each other, instruments arriving and dropping out without warning, a warm density that makes the songs feel like they’re being played in a room you’re standing in.
‘The Call’ is the clearest example – a driving track where the guitars and voices keep piling on top of each other until the whole thing lifts off, and when it does you feel it in your chest. ‘Paying for Your Love’ is faster and more urgent, a straight indie rock song that hits and moves on. ‘This Briefest Kiss’ goes somewhere different entirely – six slow-building minutes of bass and saxophone in a minor key, darker than anything else here, and the track that proves the band aren’t just coasting on warmth.
Feist returns on ‘What Happens Now’, a song left off Hug of Thunder in 2017 and brought back here. It’s sparse – just her voice, some guitar, muted drums – and she sings “I’m still in love with life, our lifetimes melt together” in a way that sounds like she’s working it out as she goes. It’s the most moving thing on the record, and a reminder of what this band does that nobody else quite manages: putting grief and happiness in the same song without either one winning.
The mid-album loses some of that focus. ‘And I Think of You’ runs to five and a half minutes and doesn’t quite fill them. A few other tracks in the second half feel like they’re waiting for a moment that doesn’t arrive. Nothing here hits with the force of the band’s best early work, and anyone coming to this expecting a You Forgot It in People for 2026 will need to adjust their expectations.
But I keep coming back to something Charles Spearin said before the record came out: “There’s a different kind of honesty in this record.” He’s right. These are people in their forties who have been through things, and the music sounds like it. Less frantic, more considered. For a sixth album nine years in the making, that’s not a disappointment. That’s the point.
