“If love was grilled cheese, that would be our album, I think.” Lead singer of Abbottsford, B.C.’s You Say Party! We Say Die! Becky Ninkovic was referring to a bumper sticker bassist Stephen O’Shea saw recently. “All those cliches you hear in the world that ‘love is all’ and ‘love is the answer’ – those are the truths. They are cheesy but nobody is going to argue with that, unless they’re haters.”

All this love Ninkovic speaks of is in regards to the new album (yet to be titled) that will be released on September 29th via Paperbag Records. “Since the last tour, we’ve finished writing and mostly recording our new album,” reveals guitarist Derek Clifford. “We’ve done a few shows here and there but we’ve just been finishing up in the studio. We’ve been trying a lot of new things and we’ve been trying to let the music breathe a little more. It’s just something we’ve never really done before; a lot of our older stuff feels relentless. We kind of strangled every drop of music we could get out of it; we strangled that shit!”

That breath was definitely apparent as two days later, the dance-punk band took the stage at midnight at Toronto’s El Mocambo, as part of Musebox’s showcase at this year’s NXNE Festivities. With a packed venue, filled with a mix of curious bystanders and long-time fans, YSP!YSD! played a set filled with new tracks, fleshed out with a couple of Lose All Time favourites (“Downtown Mayors Goodnight, Alley Kids Rule!” and “Like I Give A Care”). The newer material did in fact prove to have a lot more breathing room, as Clifford said, unravelling a much more refined and toned down sound, still reminiscent of classic YSP!YSD! traits but definitely a new chapter in the band’s life.

“We’re five years old now!” exclaimed O’Shea. “It’s been a long process, these five years growing, but it’s been a really good five years. We’ve got to go to some cool places and see some pretty cool things.”

Reflecting back to the first time the band rehearsed, O’Shea recalls Ninkovic attempting to play the guitar. “She’s like ‘I’ve got this song!’ and she picked up the guitar and she had this little song that she had written and it didn’t sound like dance-punk at all, but that song actually ended up becoming ‘Teenage Hit Wonder’ on Lose All Time!” Ninkovic takes a few minutes to jog her memory and laughs at this, while pretending to air guitar the riff to “Teenage Hit Wonder”.

“We’re somewhere a little more comfortable than we were before, I think,” says Clifford. “I think we’ve gone through the worst of the learning pains.”

Between 2007′s Lose All Time and the recording of this upcoming album, the band also released a remix album entitled Remik’s Cube; a kiss of death to some bands today. “It’s actually one of our favourite things that we’ve ever put together though,” says O’Shea. “It’s the one I enjoy the most!”

“It’s the most stress-free,” adds Clifford. “A lot of remix albums are just the same. They take the vocal samples and then just throw a beat behind it; a lot of the ones on the remix album are true to the originals. Also, we released this album to keep the ball rolling I guess. We knew we were going to take our time writing a new album so it seemed like a good opportunity to work with some new people and see what happens.”

The compiling of Remik’s Cube ultimately helped the band with the writing of their new record, as the remixes provided a “new perspective in songwriting.”

“You just start thinking of songs differently when you hear them put together in so many different ways by different people,” says Ninkovic. “There was something kind of subconscious that shifted after Remik’s Cubewith the way we wrote and I think it had something to do with that. I don’t know what, exactly.”

Whatever it was, political themes still seem to be apparent in the new material but in a “different kind of way,” as O’Shea assures. “The old songs were overtly political and in-your-face. We punched you in the face with the words ‘the gap’ and ‘the poor’ over and over and over again, but that’s not going to happen anymore because those were lyrics I wrote early on and now I don’t write the lyrics, it’s Becky’s job. I think what we continue to write about is political but you have to search for it on a much deeper level; we’re not just going to sing about every catchphrase chapter in a political science textbook you can buy from any colleges or universities.”

The next couple of months will see You Say Party! We Say Die! completing the new album and potentially playing a few more shows around their hometown. But rest assured, they will be back on the road this fall with a potentially new live aesthetic as well. “We’ve never done anything fancy before but we’re now actually beginning a new era in You Say Party and we’d like to incorporate a little more of a light show maybe and dynamics like projections or something,” previews O’Shea.

“We’re just starting to play with options now,” says O’Shea. “We’ve got plans. That’s the bottom line.”

(Also, in Singing Lamb tradition, when asked what singing animals they would be O’Shea replied with “the yawn of a sloth”, Clifford said “a screeching owl or weasel” and after a few minutes of thinking, Ninkovic decided to go with a “love bird”)

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