The Ninth Day

A six-hundred-mile canoe trip in the Canadian wilderness is a seventeen-year-old's dream adventure, but after he is mauled by a grizzly bear, it's all about staying alive. This true-life wilderness survival epic recounts seventeen-year-old Alex Messenger's near-lethal encounter with a grizzly bear during a canoe trip in the Canadian tundra. The story follows Alex and his five companions as they paddle north through harrowing rapids and stunning terrain. Twenty-nine days into the trip, while out hiking alone, Alex is attacked by a barren-ground grizzly. Left for dead, he wakes to find that his summer adventure has become a struggle to stay alive.

The Ninth Wave aren’t here to do things the easy way. The group have a history, albeit brief, of defying conventions and throwing together a mixture of sonic textures in emphatic fashion. As they prepare to release their debut record, again rules are being broken, dropping the album in two parts, with the first kicking things off this spring. The selection of six songs cover a diverse range of sounds, never settling long enough to fall into one set genre. Goth-pop (‘This Broken Design’) transitions to invigorated post-punk (‘Half Pure’), sliding into tumultuous indie (‘All the Things We Do’), into a devilish dose of ’80s nostalgia (‘A Wave Goodbye to the People Who Said I’d Win’). Avoiding staticity, each track fluidly melts a sundry of stylistic influences, culminating a half-record full of true artistic intent.