The idea for CG Tears was initially hatched just over 12 years ago.

But producer and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Greenwood, one-third of the Calgary band alongside singer-songwriter Clinton St. John and producer Chad VanGaalen, thinks it probably dates back further than that.

Greenwood says he remembers listening to one of St. John’s earlier band, The Cape May, which broke up nearly 20 years ago.

“I always wanted to work with Clinton,” says Greenwood. “I’m a huge fan from back in the day. I would listen to The Cape May and imagine electronics behind it and they were playing. Then I would nerd out about it and he’d be like ‘OK . . . thanks.'”

Greenwood was presumably already in his own band at the time, Azeda Booth, whose existence would have overlapped with the Cape May. But it wasn’t until 2013 that St. John approached Greenwood and the spark of CG Tears was born. But it was the very definition of a side project for the two musicians. St. John was busy with solo work and other bands, as was Greenwood. The latter even moved to California for a few years to play with Los Angeles electronica musician Baths.

“Casually, we just kept tinkering away at it, very on and off,” says Greenwood. “We’d go through spurts of inspiration and push each other. That’s how it started, pretty casually. We both really loved it, but it didn’t get a lot of momentum until a few years ago. That was all Clint. He was like ‘This has to happen.'”

In 2020, Greenwood returned from L.A. and the two became official bandmates when he joined St. John’s Florida B.C. and later the Calgary-Seattle band Jolie Laide with St. John, American singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia and Jeff MacLeod. Greenwood reintroduced the tracks they had been tinkering with and some new ones and CG Tears was reborn, although it perhaps didn’t have a name yet.

“For 11 years of it, it was just Clint and I hammering away,” Greenwood says. “Towards the end — 2021 or 2022 or 2023 — Clint started pushing us to finish these things. We thought we had a finished album. We tried mixing it with someone and it didn’t really work out. I felt a little bummed about it. Clint suggested taking it to our old pal Chad.”

VanGaalen is a studio wizard who not only has an adventurous collection of solo albums but also produced the noisy and acclaimed 2008 debut of avant-rock band Women. their 2010 sophomore album Public Strain and the globally successful 2014 self-titled debut of Prince Edward Island indie-pop band Alvaays. Initially, the intention was to have him mix the album. But after a listening session, VanGaalen had ideas of how to enhance the tracks.

Yes, CG Tears was a casual enterprise that moved in incremental steps over a number of years. Still, while the trio would probably balk at calling the project an indie superband, their members’ past work with The Cape May, Azeda Booth, Women and solo projects has made each of them key figures in Calgary’s music scene in the past 20 years. So a collaboration between the three is a tantalizing prospect for followers of the city’s indie scene.

The self-titled debut, which came out in September, is a truly unusual hybrid. All three musicians’ finger prints can be detected but it coalesces into something new: experimental soundscapes, electronic beats and off-kilter pop hooks. Five of the eight tracks ring in at less than three minutes. Off With Their Heads mixes sweet harmonies and a Beatlesesque melody and leads to a somewhat unsettling chorus: “Off with their heads, they only get you into trouble.” On The Room is just over two minutes of cinematic drones and found sounds, including ghostly, far-off conversations. Breezy Cell is creeping, unhinged pop that sounds like Beck at his most experimental and forlorn.

“It turned into us all — I think I can speak for the others — coming out of our comfort zones and just feeling inspired by that,” Greenwood says. “Clint doesn’t traditionally listen to electronic music in the first place. So the vocal patterns and things he comes up with are just his own. It’s an interesting marriage that happens. Chad does sequencers and he’s an electronic dude for sure, but mostly hardware. He doesn’t really use computers. Whereas I come from the computer world. Between Chad and I, we’re stepping into each other’s worlds. I think that is my take on why it’s so fun for us. We’re all getting these little glimpses into these other worlds.”

The trio seem content on continuing in a casual manner. So far they have only had a handful of gigs. In May, CG Tears followed Wolf Parade vocalist Spencer Krug with a decidedly raw performance as part of the East Town Get Down music festival. But, at the time of this interview, no future gigs had been planned.

“We’re still figuring that part out, like what feels best,” he says. “That will be an ongoing process. Every time we do it, it still feels honest. We’re just chipping away at what is the most idealized version of how to perform these.”

CG Tears is now available.