{"id":488325,"date":"2026-02-20T19:51:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T19:51:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/488325\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T19:51:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T19:51:09","slug":"the-swaggy-hi-fi-dreams-of-canadas-cootie-catcher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/488325\/","title":{"rendered":"The swaggy, hi-fi dreams of Canada\u2019s cootie catcher"},"content":{"rendered":"

When cootie catcher\u2019s video call fills my laptop screen, the Toronto four-piece are lounging on a couch at their practice space, framed by a massive, regal Lady and the Unicorn tapestry<\/a> on one wall.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cOh! Wow. Big tapestry,\u201d I say, dumbly. \u201cThat\u2019s the, like, famous one, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, uh, I have no idea what this is,\u201d guitarist\/vocalist Nolan Jakupovski replies, completely caught off guard.<\/p>\n

Giggling, bassist\u2011vocalist Anita Fowl then offers to \u201cshow the Gibby\u201d instead, an ostensibly baffling suggestion Jakupovski immediately turns down\u2014but it\u2019s fine, because somehow, I know exactly what Fowl means. Given that the band and I are roughly the same age, there\u2019s really only one thing they could be referring to. I, like a surprising number of people I know, had a friend in college who had a tapestry of shirtless Gibby from iCarly on his wall too\u2014we called it the Gibby flag\u2014and I spent far too many nights freshman year downing bad drinks in solo cups beneath the Gibby to not instantly put the pieces together. I say as much and against Jakupovski\u2019s initial sheepish hesitation, the band dutifully pans the camera to the flag<\/a>, and there he is: Gibby, arms out, nipples blazing, staring angrily down at them like a deeply stupid patron saint.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just at our practice space,\u201d Sophia Chavez (DJ, vocals, synth) says by way of explanation: they didn\u2019t choose either decoration, they just came with the room. Neither should be taken, then, as some sort of statement; it\u2019s not like the band picked them out themselves. But even so, a part of me can\u2019t help but find the juxtaposition between the medieval unicorn and the Jesus-figure of late 2000s television (this is a joke, but I stand by it) oddly fitting. This is a band, after all, whose music smashes past and present together, treating history and established genre not as something to fetishize but as raw material for something twitchy, bright, young, and pointedly present\u2011tense.<\/p>\n

cootie catcher\u2014Jakupovski, Fowl, Chavez, and drummer Joseph Shemoun\u2014have become a minor obsession in Toronto\u2019s DIY circuit by doing exactly that. They write jangly, heart\u2011on\u2011their-sleeve indie pop that could pass for classic twee if you only heard the guitars. Except it\u2019s not just guitars: the band weaves tinny drum machines, chopped\u2011up vocal snippets, and live\u2011triggered glitches into each measure, making the songs feel less like a scene revival and more like someone snuck a laptop into a basement band.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve been called \u201claptop twee,\u201d and while the band acknowledges it\u2019s an accurate description (their music is, definitionally, rather twee, and they certainly use laptops in the process of making it) something in Jakupovski still rankles at the categorization: \u201cLike, technically, that is correct,\u201d he admits. \u201cBut we\u2019re writing such different songs from other bands that sound like that. I don\u2019t know.\u201d The discrepancy perhaps comes from the role the laptop itself plays in their sound: it\u2019s an instrument in the band like any other instead of the outfit\u2019s raison d\u2019etre. Where some laptop\u2011twee peers foreground DAW chaos as the main event, cootie catcher keep the songs themselves stubbornly, almost old\u2011fashionedly, band\u2011shaped. The computer isn\u2019t there to dissolve verse\u2011chorus\u2011bridge into internet paste; it\u2019s there to jab at the songs from the sidelines, add a whistle here, a wrong\u2011sounding hi\u2011hat there, an uncanny clatter in the corners.\u00a0<\/p>\n

cootie catcher\u2019s upcoming third album, Something We All Got\u2014an acronym for SWAG, which serves as the band\u2019s personal \u201cbe yourself\u201d mantra\u2014is the first time that approach has been rendered at full, studio\u2011level resolution. Where 2025\u2019s Shy at first sounded like a brilliant mess of bedroom pop and indietronica effortlessly stitched together on the fly, Something We All Got retains that unpredictability but smoothes out the edges, blending the live instrumentals with their computer-created counterparts so fully they\u2019re often indistinguishable. The album is all bright, chiming guitars pushed forward, Shemoun\u2019s live drums and Jakupovski\u2019s drum machines playing chicken with each other, and three lyricists orbiting the same half\u2011block of late\u2011capitalist bus rides, half\u2011formed relationships, and the specific anxiety of trying to be a person in a world that keeps lapping you.<\/p>\n

Three\u2011quarters of cootie catcher\u2014Jakupovski, Fowl, Chavez\u2014have known each other since high school (Catholic high school, in fact) in Mississauga. The band started as what Fowl describes as a pandeming recording project more than anything like a career move: they wanted to learn how to play an instrument \u201cbetter, or at all,\u201d so they roped their boyfriend, Jakupovski, into making songs with them as an excuse to practice. Live shows weren\u2019t on the vision board quite yet, considering live anything was a long way off for everyone back in 2020. The pair put out a couple of tracks that were, by their own telling, \u201cpretty dumb\u201d and \u201ca little silly,\u201d the sound of two people figuring out how to write together without worrying about how any of it would work on a stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I ask them when cootie catcher stopped being \u201cjust\u201d a fun pandemic duo and became an actual group in their minds, Fowl doesn\u2019t even have to think about it. It happened, they say, \u201cpretty much as soon as we were gonna start playing live,\u201d when Chavez joined on synth and DJ controller and a childhood friend came in on drums, although the latter ended up bowing out when touring was on the table (it\u2019s a lifestyle that\u2019s not for everyone, that\u2019s for certain). Once Shemoun\u2014a drummer who earned his stripes in a high-school church band and just so happened to also love touring\u2014stepped in permanently, \u201cwe really found our formula,\u201d Fowl says. \u201cThe band solidified when Joseph joined and we all got comfortable with each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

From there, the \u201cformula\u201d is less about genre than logistics. On the recording side, most songs still begin with Jakupovski alone, writing on guitar and building a beat around whatever he\u2019s come up with. He\u2019ll obsess over tiny choices\u2014making sure the electronic kit sounds \u201ctinnier\u201d (Fowl mistakenly says \u201ctingier\u201d at one point, and he teases them mercilessly), keeping kicks at a level a real drummer can actually play with\u2014precisely so they won\u2019t box Shemoun out later. Some older tracks, he admits, are impossible to pull off live because the original beats weren\u2019t built with a human in mind; on Something We All Got, you can hear the adjustment in real time, in the way those drum\u2011machine clacks leave pockets for fills and cymbals, in how often the laptop seems to be playing with Shemoun rather than over him.<\/p>\n

Vocals and lyrics, meanwhile, work like a loose\u2011rules auction. Whoever ends up singing a song writes their own melody and words, but that decision rarely comes down to \u201cthis sounds like a Sophia song\u201d or \u201cthis feels like Anita.\u201d More often, it\u2019s pure practicality: if Jakupovski\u2019s guitar part is too gnarly to play and sing at once, someone else has to front it; if Chavez is already juggling complex DJ controllers and synth, piling lead vocals on top can be a bridge too far. On Something We All Got, that division of labor means all three songwriters get fast songs and slow ones, moody tracks and giddy ones, verses they trade back and forth and songs they completely own\u2014it\u2019s less three lanes than a roundabout, with everyone merging and peeling off as needed.<\/p>\n

You can hear all three approaches ricocheting off each other on Something We All Got. In \u201cStraight drop,\u201d Fowl struggles to choke down emotion\u2014\u201cI\u2019d rather cry in public \/ than in front of you\u201d\u2014then tries to convince themselves to take \u201cwhat I can get \/ even if it\u2019s not all that I ever wanted.\u201d In \u201cGingham dress,\u201d Chavez describes being eight months into a limbo relationship and realizing only then that the other person won\u2019t commit; she plays \u201cpseudo wife,\u201d cleans the bottles off their desk, wrestles with the lack of closure. Jakupovski\u2019s \u201cPuzzle pop,\u201d meanwhile, zooms out to a more ambient frustration\u2014trying to get home from somewhere that suddenly feels too far, trying to know someone who refuses to try to know you. (Although Jakupovski and Fowl have been a couple for years, their relationship is rarely the subject of their songs, for fairly obvious reasons. Their relationship is part of cootie catcher\u2019s origin story more than its lyrical engine; the songs stay zoomed in on city streets, bad days, and lopsided crushes, not intra\u2011band drama.)<\/p>\n

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One of the surprises of cootie catcher is how rarely any of that individualism gets them into a fight. On paper, they\u2019re a recipe for permanent deadlock: three singers, three lyricists, four people with wildly different record collections, zero shared \u201cdesert island band\u201d picks. \u201cIt\u2019s like a four\u2011way Venn diagram,\u201d Jakupowski says of their collective music taste. \u201cI don\u2019t know if there\u2019s one band that we all agree on.\u201d Chavez concurs: \u201cBetween all four of us? No.\u201d Fowl tries to think of even just a single song they\u2019d have the same opinion on, but quickly calls it quits: \u201cIt\u2019d take too long.\u201d When they try to imagine making a covers set, everyone simply groans. \u201cEveryone would just be like, this sucks,\u201d Shemoun laughs.<\/p>\n

But even so\u2014\u201cWe never, like, argue over this stuff,\u201d Jakupovski says. \u201cWe all do agree about what we\u2019re making.\u201d Each member is, as Chavez puts it, \u201cin charge of [their] own part\u201d: Shemoun sneaks in kraut\u2011rock\u2011ish patterns when he can; Chavez leans toward DIY looseness and \u201ckid aesthetic\u201d in her melodies; Fowl thinks in comic book\u2011like narratives; and Jakupovski makes sure the whole thing doesn\u2019t tip over into either pure laptop mush or straight rock bandness. Vision, for cootie catcher, is apparently the easy part. Taste, on the other hand, is chaos\u2014and that\u2019s how they like it.<\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one place cootie catcher actually do agree, it\u2019s on what the band is and isn\u2019t trying to be. They\u2019re happy to wear the twee tag, if need be\u2014\u201dAlthough we\u2019re definitely going more the Ivy route,\u201d Jakupovski insists, \u201cWe\u2019re not doing, like, a Dean Blunt style thing\u201d\u2014but Fowl is quick to clarify that they \u201cdid not start out with the intention of being twee,\u201d and that the label stuck after the fact rather than being a mission statement. They prefer to think of themselves as a strange, present\u2011day branch off an older tree\u2014an older twee, if you will. In Jakupovski\u2019s head, cootie catcher is what would happen \u201cif a Beat Happening\u2011type band were in this age\u201d: simple, emotionally direct songs put through a laptop without letting the computer become the whole point. The band name\u2011checks Disco Inferno\u2019s late\u2011\u201980s collision of samples and guitars, the German micro\u2011scenes around Lali Puna and Guther, the way Everything But the Girl and Saint Etienne made dance music feel like full bands. The common thread between these acts, to cootie catcher, is their ability to \u201cmold the acoustic and electric at the same time and do it actually live.\u201d In that sense, the twee is just the vehicle. The cootie catcher effect, then, feels less like a scene revival and more like a Trojan horse: familiar indie\u2011rock shells smuggling in lofi beats and chopped\u2011up samples.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where their allergy to capital\u2011N Nostalgia comes in. They\u2019re suspicious of anything that feels like costume play, especially in the lo\u2011fi realm. \u201cI\u2019m not a huge fan of throwback stuff,\u201d Jakupovski admits. \u201cI feel like being lo\u2011fi on purpose really places a song in a specific time. I would like to make something timeless.\u201d Shemoun is even more blunt about his preferences\u2014\u201cI would definitely always want to go to a studio. I\u2019d rather everything sound hi\u2011fi and crisp and clear.\u201d The closest they come to a self\u2011applied genre tag is a bit Jakupovski tosses off about their beats: they\u2019re aiming for something that sounds like the MIDI music in a Greek restaurant, plasticky drum machines clacking away under very human guitars and voices. \u201cThat\u2019s what our beats kind of sound like,\u201d he laughs. \u201cThe genre is Greek restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Fowl and Chavez, both visual artists who graduated from OCAD and still juggle art and teaching alongside the band, the aversion to retro is less about fidelity than about feel. Chavez talks about embracing a naivete in both her drawings and her lyrics\u2014DIY, messy, unembarrassed by childlike framing. Fowl compares their songs to their comics: smaller, conversational story panels strung together, not some big oil painting of a concept. Both grew up on bedroom pop and lo\u2011fi records, and Fowl (like yours truly) will still ride for the scrappier versions of bands like Car Seat Headrest, but what really matters is a song having \u201ca good recording,\u201d not an era signifier.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Between the split\u2011up process and the lack of a common musical taste, there are a lot of reasons why Something We All Got could easily feel like three mini\u2011albums stapled together, but it never does. Part of that cohesion is sonic\u2014those bright guitars and Greek restaurant MIDI textures glue everything together\u2014but a lot of it comes down to scale. They all keep gravitating to the same size of story: extremely small. \u201cWe pretty much just write about what we know,\u201d Fowl says. \u201cSo it\u2019s a lot of mundane, day\u2011to\u2011day life stuff, but that probably also keeps the songwriting unified.\u201d<\/p>\n

That shared mundanity is important enough that they joke about what would happen if someone broke the spell. \u201cIt would be crazy if, like, two of us were like that and one of us was, like, a super fantastical storyteller,\u201d Fowl laughs. \u201cGod, imagine if one of us tried to write an Edgar Allen Poe thing.\u201d Jakupovski quickly lays down the law: \u201cWe would have to have a conversation about it.\u201d Shemoun, who hasn\u2019t written a cootie catcher song yet, sees his opening: \u201cJust wait until I write a song,\u201d he deadpans. Everyone cracks up. \u201cOkay, yeah, when Joseph starts singing, we\u2019re gonna have to sit down and have a serious talk about it,\u201d Jakupovski grins.<\/p>\n

As bright and joyous as their sound often is, their subject matter is about as down-to-earth as it could get: work, money, faltering relationships, the way adult life quietly colonizes whatever romance you thought you were writing about. \u201cEveryone writes what they know,\u201d Jakupovski shrugs. And what he knows is the city he sees on his trek across Toronto as a guitar teacher: kids in school programs who will only play if he bribes them with candy, a student who lives next door to Glenn Gould\u2019s childhood home, men on the subway eating newspapers and chicken wings out of backpacks. \u201cToronto is a funny city,\u201d he says. \u201cI see lots of funny things every day.\u201d (I point out that most of them seem to be people eating weird things, or occasionally, normal things in weird ways. He just shrugs again, laughing: \u201cIt\u2019s a funny city!\u201d) There\u2019s something grim in it, too, though: a man eating a magazine on public transit is funny, a man eating a magazine on public transit because he\u2019s gone for weeks without food is less so. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m in that movie Parasite sometimes,\u201d Jakupovski says at one point, in reference to his cross-city journeys to teach bored rich kids how to play instruments at their parents\u2019 behest. You can\u2019t try for adulthood in 2026 without gaining a bone-deep awareness of the impacts of late-stage capitalism, and the members of cootie catcher are certainly no exception.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the tension Something We All Got keeps playing with: how do you make a life for yourself in a world that doesn\u2019t always want you to have one? The songs keep that question small on purpose\u2014glitchy, tinny samples stitched to clean, bright guitars; electronic hi\u2011hats that sound ripped from a cheap kids\u2019 keyboard chattering against Shemoun\u2019s very human, sometimes kraut\u2011rock\u2011ish patterns; three writers dealing with the same anxieties from slightly different angles. It\u2019s not an Album About Late-Stage Capitalism, so to speak, but it keeps circling the same handful of daily knots: how to stay hopeful without lying to yourself, how to live without losing yourself, how to move through a city that\u2019s always one step ahead of you, how to stop mistaking comfort for genuine care.<\/p>\n

At the same time, though, Jakupovski is upfront \u201cthat we\u2019re not trying to be so serious.\u201d Take the album title, for instance. When I finally ask the obvious question\u2014how intentional was the SWAG acronym?\u2014Chavez doesn\u2019t hesitate. \u201cOh, super intentional.\u201d It\u2019s the real album title; the phrase \u201csomething we all got\u201d doesn\u2019t actually mean anything, and they just thought it was funny because, in Jakupovski\u2019s words, \u201cit sounds like some bullshit indie album title a band would actually use.\u201d He remembers someone recently asking if Something We All Got was \u201cthis, like, interconnecting personal thing,\u201d then having to awkwardly admit it was just an acronym for the word \u201cswag.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the same time, the joke keeps accidentally turning into a thesis. \u201cI think sometimes we do things because we like being kind of satirical with it,\u201d Chavez says, referencing both the title and the hyper-serious album cover, which sees all four band members staring blankly into the camera, positioned like an awkwardly official family photo. \u201cBut it also is kind of the point.\u201d Something We All Got was originally only intended as a vehicle to get \u201cswag\u201d in there, but Fowl says it slots into place weirdly perfectly in retrospect. \u201cWe feel like outsiders,\u201d Chavez says. \u201cWe\u2019re all different. But we\u2019re not, really, at the same time.\u201d When I ask what swag even is in 2026, I realize I\u2019ve walked right into the answer. Shemoun lets a perfect beat pass, then deadpans once more: \u201cIt\u2019s just something we all got.\u201d<\/p>\n

Something We All Got\u00a0is out February 27 on Carpark Records.<\/p>\n

Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at\u00a0Paste\u00a0and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross<\/a>) or email her at\u00a0[email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When cootie catcher\u2019s video call fills my laptop screen, the Toronto four-piece are lounging on a couch at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-488325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}