Album review: Nostalgia by Mother Mother
Indie Rock/Alt/Art Pop – Released by Warner Music Canada, June 6th 2025.
Why This Release Matters — and Deserves Your Ears:
This album is a true anthem to creative and artistic freedom — a full expression of an artistic vision that refuses to be confined by cliques, instead making exploration and cross-genre blending its very identity.
It’s a crucial album for 2025, showing artists the way to realize their own vision by fearlessly exploring new territory.
In-Depth Review:
The Canadian band Mother Mother, on the 20th anniversary of their formation, return with their tenth album, Nostalgia.
Their sound and feel are genre-defying, thanks to their attitude and openness to a rich, enormous range of stylistic languages in the album.
The songs seem to unfold like scenes—each track is like a short film with its own self-contained story, complete with emotional arcs, shifts, tonal changes, and plot twists.
This immense stylistic and compositional richness doesn’t water down the album at all—on the contrary, it shapes and strengthens its personality, thanks to the band’s highly cohesive sonic and expressive identity, their distinctive sound, and their voices.
This variety is also reflected in the lyrics, which explore themes ranging from magical thinking to memory, from gender roles to personal emotions.
The vocal interplay between Ryan Guldemond, Molly Guldemond, and Jasmin Parkin is truly outstanding—perfectly complementary and incredibly effective.
Their voices shine individually and in harmony, adding expression to the songs’ storytelling, which ranges from theatrical to intimate, eventually building up to rousing choruses.
The production, handled by Ryan Guldemond and Jason Van Poederooyen, is top-tier—always refined, adding depth and power, and highlighting the narrative journey within each song.
The guitars are beautiful, the synths just as striking, and at just the right moments, the drums rise to something outright epic.
The album states its personality from the very start: the opening track Love To Deathevokes a kind of “pop cabaret” vibe—light yet alternative at the same time—then shifts into Make Believe with gritty guitars, rock energy, and a catchy chorus, eventually diving into the acoustic ballad Station Wagon.
The powerful On and On (Song for Jasmine) brings back the rock guitars and immediate-impact sound, with a strong bass synth and full-bodied guitars in the chorus—there might even be a baritone guitar in A♯ adding extra punch and depth.
And so the journey continues through the rest of the album with this same variety. The intro of Make Believe reminded me of the American alternative band Mass Gothic, which speaks to Mother Mother’s broad sonic exploration—even in alternative modes—before launching into extraordinary vocal virtuosity.
Namaste returns to the acoustic, while Finger plays brilliantly both lyrically (addressing gender roles) and musically.
Me & You, Little Mistake, and Mano a Mano once again show off the band’s taste for variety, roleplay, and scene changes.
Nostalgia, the title track, contains no artistic or stylistic nostalgia. On the contrary—it sounds fresh and contemporary. It’s a nostalgia captured in snapshots, like the many scenes that play out and are narrated in the rest of the album. Despite never being repetitive for even a moment, the album manages to end in a surprising way with the final track, To Regret.
In the opening bars, the song conveys an intimate atmosphere, almost the opposite of the full, powerful, sophisticated sound of the tracks that came before it.
You can hear the ambient sounds of the recording room—the creak of the piano’s wood, incidental voices in the background—as if you’re sitting beside the performer in their home, in their own private world.
A brilliant and unexpected ending for an album that had, up until that moment, sounded majestic—and now leaves us in intimacy, as if that journey through nostalgia had been a dream, and now we’re waking up in a city apartment, facing a piano where that dream is being told.
Review by Stefano Barone
