Slipping under the radar in 2022, the debut release from Envy Of None appeared to bypass many. A true Canadian / American supergroup, this ambient cinematic rock collective, which comprises Alex Lifeson, Andy Curran, Maiah Wynne and Alfio Annibalini, produced one of the most invigorating and compelling albums of recent years. Now, the band, for they are now truly a band with Randy Cooke adding drums, are back with sophomore album Stygian Waves or Stygian Wavz, depending on what you read.
Stygian Waves is a truly phenomenal release. Beautifully composed and featuring 11 complexly crafted tracks that range in style and tempo, it’s an album that is going to grow and grow on repeated plays.
It’s morning in Canada when I join Alfio Annibalini via Zoom to explore Stygian Waves. We laugh about the time difference and our poor maths. Alf is in good form, and over the next 30 minutes, we talk about much more than just the new album. Having interviewed Andy a couple of years ago, it’s good to catch a different perspective on Envy Of None.
Having congratulated Alf on the new record, we immediately explore the format for listening to music. “Thank you so much, man,” he says. “If you don’t mind me asking what kind of hard copy do you like to listen to?” Having explained that vinyl is the format of choice, we explore whether Envy Of None focus on any format when they are working on their music.
“Honestly,” says Alf, “When I’m mixing or working or editing or doing any of that, I’m not really thinking about the result, as much as the quality of whatever it is that we’re doing. We happen to work with a wonderful mastering engineer who’s able to take whatever I give him and make it playable on all different types of formats. And so, I’m not really thinking if this is going to be okay on vinyl or streaming.
“I do what everybody does. I listen to things in various places. My car is one of my favourite places to check stuff, you know. Where we all listen to music, right? So that’s more of the thinking of how I go about doing it as opposed to trying to target something very specific. So, my thoughts on it are if it’s good work and the mix is good and the production is good, then it doesn’t really matter where you play it back. It’s going to translate.”
It’s all about the system you play it on, we agree, although Alf does surprise me when he explains that he will check the mixes on the phone. “Just to see,” he says, “because people will be hearing it like that.”
I return to my interview with Andy, where he told me that most of the recording of Envy Of None was completed separately, with the individual members sending through their own parts. I ask Alf if this is still the case, with modern technology making this even easier. “That’s a really good point. To create what we do, I think everybody including Alex, including Maiah, we all feel like we work more efficiently when we’re by ourselves and nobody else in the band hears what you’re up to until you’re happy with it.
“Which is an entirely different dynamic than if you’re in a recording studio. With Maiah, we had her in the studio for a week last March. She was doing vocals, and you just have these three goons going, what about this, and try this. You could just see her getting flustered. We were like, you know what? This is a fun hang, but let’s go back to work in our own places.
“There’s constantly new technology coming out. I’ve just upgraded my entire system just as we were finishing the record.”
Alf tells me that his studio, where he is calling from, is in the basement of his house and is often being upgraded with new equipment. We digress into Alf’s career as a producer and engineer, which is extensive and dates back over 30 years. Check out his entries on Discogs for the full and incredibly impressive discography.
We then deviate further into a discussion about new kit and whether we are geeks or just use the equipment to do what we need it to do. Alf is very much in the latter camp. “I work with what I need to use,” he says. “At the end of the day, they’re tools to just try and get the ideas across and try and get everything finished. I’m honestly the least techie person considering what it is that I do. I don’t really care a whole lot about technology when it comes to like just learning all of it. I’m not that fascinated. I’m more fascinated about the chorus of a song rather than, what does this plugin do.”
On the debut album, Andy said that Alex was very much leaving the other three to “beat the song up,” and then he would thread the bits of guitar through it. This time round it was completely different. “No, he was in from the get-go on this one. It’s a whole different record than the first one in the sense that I think it’s much more unified sounding for a lot of different reasons. But we were all in from the very beginning.”
It’s fact that Envy Of None was initially a project rather than a band, as Alf confirms. “I think there is a sense that, and Alex has said this in various interviews, where the first one was almost more of a project. It was people coming together with a collection of songs, working on those songs and trying to get the best out of those songs.
“Then when we realised we had some pretty good songs, it was kind of like, oh, crap, what do we do with this? This time was very much we’re signed to a label. We’re ready to go. We know we’re making another record, and this is more of a band effort, right down to the fact that there are drums across it.
“So there’s a unifying kind of thread that goes through the whole thing. Lyrically, I see some of that, but definitely instrumentally in terms of the drums going through. It’s different drummers on songs, but, just the fact that there’s another human playing to the beat with Andy and keeping the groove going. It just kind of ties in the whole record a little bit better.”
It was after the first record that Alf felt that there was that realisation that Envy Of None was more than a project. “I think that after the first record came out and we had done all the interviews and we got back to work on this one almost immediately. We joke that the record came out, and the next day, we started working on it or something to that effect.
“But it’s not that that’s not that wrong really because it wasn’t that big a break. When we finished the first record and then the EP and then immediately came out with this one, so songs were always kind of flying around. We knew that we were going to do another record. Whether we publicly admitted it or not is a different story, but we knew we were going to do it.
“I think we got the sense that when we started the second record that this was no longer a project. This was this was a band, and when we finished this record, we thought, damn, this is a pretty good band. That opens up a whole bunch of different possibilities in terms of what we do next and what the next step is.”
It would be impossible not to discuss what Maiah has brought to the band. Her vocal performance on Envy Of None was great, but on Stygian Waves, she reaches almost unbelievable heights. If you haven’t, then it’s also worth listening to her latest album Out Of The Dark, which also featured Alf and Alex and which is simply stunning.
Back to Stygian Waves, and if you’ve got a good set of headphones, then it really, really works in terms of the layered vocals. Alf is full of praise. “Well, you know what? She does this thing where sometimes you’ll get a vocal from her very quickly. The Story was like that. She basically had that mapped out very, very quickly. What ended up on the record is not that different from what I originally heard from her. And even then, things were different.
“Her life is different now. She lives in a different place. She’s older. I think her life experiences, some of them have been great, some of them maybe have been challenging like everybody, and we often say we’re starting to hear her life coming out in terms of just the way that she delivers the vocals.
“But I must tell you about being the person who has the great honour to receive her work and mix them and solo them and listen to them. I almost think we should put out a record of just Maiah singing Acapela because of the rate of the vocal arrangement. It’s astounding. It’s absolutely astounding. I’ve been in the room with her when she’s doing it and it’s fast.
“It’s not like something when she’ll say, Oh, I have an idea for something. She sings a part and then you think, oh, wow, that was cool. I didn’t see that coming. Then she’ll harmonise it and then there’ll be a counter melody. That and something else will come in, and that’s just the way she works now.
“But her ears, how she hears things and just the way that she’s able to craft and put things together is incredible. We go through and we organise it and make it make it all pretty and whatever. But the nuts of it are just there from the minute she starts singing it, and I’m telling you, I couldn’t agree with you more. Her performance on this record is astounding. It’s absolutely astounding. We’re very fortunate to have her in our band.”
Whilst it’s inevitable that Rush will crop up in any interview where Alex is involved, I was keen to steer the conversation away from the legendary outfit, but we did touch on Alex’s playing on Stygian Waves. I tell Alf about my visit to Portsmouth for the Geddy Lee spoken word show and the excitement when Alex joined Geddy on stage.
“I’m a Canadian kid that played rock music and guitar,” Alf reassures me. “Those guys were making records and are part of my DNA. You couldn’t be somebody who grew up the way I did and not be a fan. The Story was the first one that he put a solo on. Andy and I joke all the time because if we ask him to put one, we don’t get one and when we don’t say anything, that’s what we get.
“There is a thing that happened with that song [The Story]. We had to rearrange it a little bit so that the solo had a space to breathe because, originally, it wasn’t there at all. So we kind of shuffled some things around. We kind of moved a bunch of things around it, but Alex created this beautiful thing in the middle of the song where the solo kind of lifts the whole song up. And then there’s this interplay between her vocal and him on the outro.
“That, to me, is just the best part of the entire song. I’ve seen an interview with Paul McCartney where he was saying that he and John Lennon used to do things to try and get people to go back to the beginning of the song and play it over again.
“To me, that was that section of the song where I thought, man, if this gets people, it’s the thing that’s going to make them want to hear it again. That solo is such a trademark. When I heard it come out, I just thought there’s nobody else on the planet that can get that sound and pick those notes. It’s just not gonna happen.”
The Story is a song that I keep playing. It’s such a dark song and the video is something else. Alf explains that Maiah arranged that and that the others had no idea she was going to do it. “There are some vocals on the outro, some of the lines are just like, I’m gonna paraphrase a little bit, but it’s something like, I’m going to look in the mirror until I come back clean. I’m just like, oh, my God. How do you come up with that?
“Then seeing her in the video looking one way and then in the vision coming back from the reflection is completely different, I was just like, whoa. I didn’t know we were going Black Metal. She said, I have this idea of playing with shadows and light versus dark because that’s basically the song.
“Jaden D, who did our first video with her for Look Inside, worked with Maiah again, and they just kind of went away and came back every now and then. He sent us clips and we were like, whoa, this is cool.”
For me, Envy Of None appeared from nowhere to a certain extent. Did Alf or the band have any expectations about what they wanted the reception to be, or was it what most musicians want, which was to be happy with it themselves.
“You want people like it, you want people to listen to it and you want to make it so that you’re giving other people enjoyment by listening to it. But I’ve said this to them all along, that if when you finish something, if we can look at each other and we’re loving it, we’re smiling, then we’ve done our job.
“We’re not trying to follow any trends. We’re not trying to do anything like that. We’re just trying to please each other, and hopefully, in doing that, other people will come along for the ride and kind of get what we’re doing. Cause, let’s face it, how ridiculous would it be if we started trying to write pop songs? It would be ridiculous. So, all we can do is just make ourselves as happy as we possibly can and you do want people to like it.”
As someone who spends most of his time listening to hard rock and Metal, Envy Of None is a revelation in many ways. It’s clever and interesting, and it speaks to me in a way less music does these days.
Envy Of None have created a sound which is now totally identifiable as them, which is brilliant in two albums. “It’s kind of remarkable really,” Alf reflects. “But I think it’s because of that thought process that we’re not really trying to do anything other than just write good music. Let’s face it, the minute Maiah is on it then we are okay. We could do whatever we wanted and if we don’t have that vocal on it, forget it.
“But the minute she sings on it, there’s that unifying factor that is suddenly her vocal arrangement and her voice and the beauty of the notes and the lyrics that that she chooses. Alex has said it before. She’s a freaking genius. And I’ll say it.
“I think that also sometimes you get this big brooding heavy machine where she’s singing these with this beautiful vocal on top of it, and it’s not gothic. It’s not anything like that, it’s just this atmospheric kind of sound.”
When Envy Of None was released, I read several reviews that appeared to be from fans of Rush who were very narrow in their response to it. Alf laughs with me as we consider some of the replies, particularly the charge of no guitar.
“Like the whole record is guitars,” he laughs. “There are very few keyboards on it. It’s all like atmospheric sounds that we’re doing with strings. It’s not the thing that I think people expected from Alex and now you know that probably upsets some Rush fans for sure because it doesn’t have odd time signatures or key changes. The reviews were funny, but the comments on Instagram are hilarious.”
I mention to Alf about the limited band merch in the UK and Europe, especially in terms of the new t-shirt range. Did he ever think he would be immortalised in a kind of Captain Scarlet way on a shirt, as seen on the band’s new Envy Of None Is Go shirt?
“Hang on, hang on, hold on. So, we’re in a band meeting. I can’t remember what the hell we were talking about, and Andy says, oh and he holds this up [a print of the cartoon on the t-shirt]. It’s brilliant. We lost it. We absolutely lost it. Alex was like, that’s the album cover. We already had the artwork done. He’s like, that’s the album cover and we’re like, hang on there. Whoa, whoa. Settle down.
“But yeah, it’s stunning. It’s brilliant. They gave me T-shirt. When was it? Last week or whatever it is. It’s hilarious. We’re trying to figure out how to incorporate that into more things moving forward.”
It certainly sums up the humour that lies behind the band, which Andy had previously explained, and of course, we know about Alex’s sense of humour. “Oh, it’s crazy,” says Alf. “We had dinner together not that long ago, and I swear to God, my face was sore for two days.”
As we move towards the end of our chat, I ask Alf about his favourite songs on the album. “I’ve always loved The Story,” he says. “Under The Stars is an important song for us lyrically. It was a difficult, difficult song to be honest with you. It went through a bunch of different permutations. We were kind of, is this ever gonna happen? When Alex put his guitar solo on it, we thought, okay, now it’s ready to go.
“That one’s special because I always thought that was a brilliant chorus. From the minute Andy hummed it to me, I thought, oh, man, that’s a good one. Even with him singing it in the demos, I thought, jeez, this is something. But it just didn’t come together the way some of the other songs came together in terms of the speed of it.
“Thrill Of The Chase, to me, is a lot of fun. I’m mortified that it’s on the record because it’s from a demo of me singing through a vocoder from years ago, after, I don’t know, maybe one or one or two bourbons and having a lot of fun. Initially, I was against it, but I’m so happy that we did it now because I just think it’s hilarious. Handle With Care has a cool vibe too.”
Alf tells me that Envy Of None did take a bit of a break after completing Stygian Waves. He explains that it was a difficult mix with some challenges in the atmospheric elements. With the others having different projects as well, it seemed a break was sensible. Alf reassures me that they are back at it now with Alf sending some bits and pieces to Andy just the week before our chat.
We finish up with some wider chat about Coney Hatch and their appearance at Sweden Rocks which Andy was telling me about at our last conversation. Alf recalls that one tour with Iron Maiden was cancelled but thinks that Sweden Rocks went well. We drift into another Canadian institution, April Wine, who I had recently seen with Uriah Heep.
“No way,” says Alf. “Oh, my God. That’s amazing. I think the second band I saw was April Wine. The first I saw was KISS playing a little hockey arena in Sudbury to 6,000 people with Cheap Trick opening. I was like, well, you guys ruined my life. I must do this now for the rest of my life. Thank you.”
So once again, it’s Messrs Simmons and Stanley who are at the root of everything. I laugh. It leads to the final question which is whether there are any plans for Envy Of None to play live. “In terms of the band, yeah,” Alf says. “We’re trying to put that together. We’ve gone as far as talking to an agent and doing some research on the numbers and what that would look like. It’s a tough thing, because we’re going to have to bring in extra people to play. The rehearsal factor of the event, we want to be able to control and do the show properly.”
Alf says that there was mention of festivals, but we agree that their music needs more. The music deserves a big production, I say. I don’t want to be sitting there with blokes that have been drinking all day just screaming. I want to be sat in a nice auditorium, maybe with a glass of wine, allowing the music to wash over me.
“You’re not jumping the gun,” Alf says. “You’re 100% right. That’s exactly the way that we’re thinking that it wouldn’t really come off in that environment. You nailed it, dude. You nailed it. That’s exactly it. And not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love a good festival just as much as anybody else. But, it’s just not the right place. But stay tuned because it is in discussion.”
And there we leave it. Alf, along with Andy before him, are two of the loveliest musicians I have ever spent time talking with. The new Envy Of None album is superb, and I cannot wait for the vinyl to arrive so I can savour it even more.
Now, how do I get MetalTalk to sort out a trip to Canada to catch them live? Hmm.
Envy Of None – Stygian Waves – Is released on 28 March 2025 via Kscope. Pre-orders in all formats are available from EnvyOfNone.lnk.to/waves.
