Helloooo all you wacky wonderful Wyntry wazoo-kickers! (and if ‘wazoo-kickers’ wasn’t an alternate expression of ‘ass-kickers’ before, it is now. We needed a ‘w’ word.)
We hope you’re having a safe and happy holiday. We know it sure isn’t easy under the circumstances but we hope you can make the best of it. We’re taking a little holiday time off ourselves, we figure it’s better to play it safe and not risk ruining anyone’s family gatherings. There will be plenty to do when the new year rolls around. And yes, we’re optimistic that it will be a GREAT year!
Looking back on 2021 (pandemic aside, of course) turns up some pretty cool milestones! Despite Covid restrictions and lockdowns, and a near total ban on live music for a good chunk of the year, we still managed to find creative ways to keep busy and productive. We hit the ground running in January with the release of our single Fool on all the platforms, and followed that up in February with Beautiful Disaster before dragging the gear to Hillside Audio to record three new tracks in March for the next batch of releases. (Incidentally, Beautiful Disaster was featured on Live 88.5’s Big Money Shot Spotlight and we got our very first airplay on local radio!)
Come April we had the new songs ready to go and we did something a little unusual by releasing the video for Door before releasing the actual single itself in early May. The month of May also saw another video release – the infamous Suicidal Squirrel video! That one even got an on-air mention at Rebel 101.7! It is rather funny, you really should go watch it you haven’t seen it yet. Or even if you have hehehe…
Jumping ahead to July, we released our cover of the Tragically Hip classic Blow at High Dough on Canada Day. Gord Downie was a passionate advocate for indigenous rights, and given the horrific discoveries of children buried in mass graves at several former residential schools we wanted to call attention to the Every Child Matters movement that was gathering momentum at the time. We have the song available on our Bandcamp and will donate every penny it makes to the Downie & Wenjack Foundation for Indigenous Reconciliation. Find out more about the foundation at downiewenjack.ca
By this time all the songs and videos we were able to release had been released, and live venue restrictions began to ease a little so it was time to go out and play all this material for people! Our first show back from the 2021 edition of the lockdowns was on August 13th at the Brass Monkey with Innerpiece and Black Water Brigade. On October 23rd we headed down to Kingston where we joined God Thorn and Vinyl Hero at Overtime Sports Bar, and we were thrilled to see a few familiar faces that had made the trip to Kingston to see us play. You know who you are and we can’t thank you enough. What a memorable show that was!
On November 12th we hooked up with our pals in Innerpiece again, along with long-time Ottawa faves Enforcer, for a raucous evening at Mavericks in downtown Ottawa**.** We played our last show of 2021 on November 26th a few blocks away at Avant-Garde Bar with Toronto’s Napoleon as well as Bristol Mines and Mod Unit from right here in Ottawa.
All in all it was actually a pretty good year! We got to play a few shows with some amazing bands and released a few songs we’re really happy with. Looking ahead to 2022, we’re going back to the studio in February. We’ll be working with our main dude Cameron Dunn at Hillside Audio again to record some new material and hopefully package it all up in our first full-length album sometime in the summer. Fingers crossed.
We want to thank all of you for your support and encouragement as we navigated the pandemic minefield. Thank you for coming to the shows, thank you for watching the videos, and for adding us to your playlists, thank you for buying the merch. It means the world to us and motivates us to continue bringing you the most kickass – umm, we mean kickwazoo music we know how to make. We wish each of you and your loved ones the best for the holidays and we look forward to seeing your screaming faces from up on a stage sometime in the new year!
Wyntr - Hard Rock from Ottawa 