Sick Puppy performed during Sled Island on Wednesday, June 17th at Ship & Anchor & Thursday, June 18th at Sloth Records.

Interview Audio:

Interview Transcript:

Willow (CJSW)
All right, I’m Willow Pflueger with CJSW 90.9 FM at Sled Island 2026. I’m here with the band Sick Puppy.

Jacob
Hello.

Isobel
Hi.

Allison
Hello.

Luke
Yellow.

Willow (CJSW)
Would you guys mind introducing yourselves and your role in the band?

Jacob
Sure, I’m Jacob. I play the drums.

Isobel
I’m Isobel, I play guitar, and I sing and scream a little bit too.

Allison
I’m Allison, I play the bass.

Luke
I’m Luke, and I also play the guitar.

Isobel
So quiet, Luke.

Willow (CJSW)
This is not your first Sled Island. You also played in 2023. How does it feel to be back?

Isobel
Feels really good. It was a little bit of a different lineup situation when we played last time, so it’s nice to be here in our final form as a four piece, because last time we played, Allison was busy doing big academic stuff, so she couldn’t join us, so we had our friend, other friend Liam, who is here with Invisible Hand, play bass for us that time, so it was really fun, but I feel like we’re it was a bit more scrappy and crazy back then, and we’re a bit more of a real band, I would say. What do you think?

Jacob
Yeah, no, I feel like we had a lot of fun last time, but yeah, it was a bit more thrown together last minute, so it’s nice to have the whole real band here.

Allison
Yeah, Luke is a new member of the band, so he’s, he’s played like three shows with us, so.

Luke
And this, this last show is by far the most recent, yeah.

Isobel
That’s accurate.

Willow (CJSW)
So you traveled here from Newfoundland, right? How long are you here for?

Isobel
We are here till, we’re gonna fly back on Monday, I think. Luke’s flying back on Sunday, but yeah, we’ll be here till Monday. We’re enjoying the rest of the festival, so we finished our last show yesterday, so it’s nice to be able to just kind of chill and enjoy.

Willow (CJSW)
Are there any other artists that you’re excited to check out for the festival?

Isobel
Yeah, I’m excited. I’m excited to see HOMESHAKE. I feel like I, yeah, that’s tonight, and billy woods. I really wanted to see Sextile last night, but I think we all, we were really, really tired after playing.

Allison
For the record, I did line up, but.

Isobel
Allison was ready. Allison was ready to party. Allison’s the party girl. Allison’s ready. Yeah, any other artists?

Jacob
Etran de L’Aïr, I think, are also playing tonight. I’m stoked to see that. Yeah.

Allison
I saw Backxwash last night.

Luke
That was awesome.

Allison
Yeah, so good. I think she’s been to Newfoundland a couple times.

Isobel
Yes, Backxwash – we’ve seen at Lawnya Vawnya before. Lawnya Vawnya, Lawnya Vawnya is like our Sled in St. John’s. It’s like a short, smaller version of Sled, I would say. And yeah, it’s always fun to, it’s always fun to like see people that you saw a couple years ago and like see what the evolution has been. Yeah, Backxwash is a good example of that.

Willow (CJSW)
Speaking of you know, St. John’s, what is the music like? What is the music scene like there?

Isobel
Music scene right now, very lots of young, crazy punk kids, lots of lots of little scrappy hardcore bands, which is always fun. Yeah, St. John’s has a very eclectic music scene, I feel like. For instance, Luke and Jacob are in, like, a couple country bands and stuff, so it’s always fun. There’s a lot going on, and lots of, like, trad music too, which is always fun to check out.

Jacob
Yeah, I feel like St. John’s is also small enough that there’s like, there’s a very high concentration of artists and musicians for how small the population is, but it’s not a big enough city that people can kind of like all split off into their own kind of micro scenes, like everyone kind of all plays with each other all the time.

Isobel
Out of necessity.

Jacob
Yeah, and like a lot of mixed genre shows, so it’s like, you know, we’re playing a show, and there’s also going to be like maybe like a rapper and like indie rock band and like a hardcore band all playing the same show, and it’s not really weird, because it’s like we’re all friends anyway, so we’re just like everyone’s just playing shows with other artists that they think are good. It doesn’t really matter what anyone sounds like.

Willow (CJSW)
How does playing local shows compare to touring and playing larger festivals like Sled Island and Lawnya Vawnya?

Jacob
I mean, it’s, it’s all, it’s all different. It’s like I feel like we are so comfortable playing local shows in Newfoundland now that we don’t even really think about it much, and it’s like, again, it very much feels like we’re kind of just going to hang out with our friends, and then at some point we get up on stage and play some songs, but like, yeah, playing festivals like this is is cool, because I feel like, like, we played The Ship & Anchor on Wednesday night, and that was a free show, and it was packed, and it was like a lot of people that I’m sure have never heard of us before, but then there was also people singing along to some of our songs, which is wild to see this far away from where we’re from, but yeah, it’s always, it’s always interesting to see how, like, a crowd at a festival is going to react to to your band.

Isobel
Yeah, I also personally find playing, like, in a city that I’m not as familiar with kind of more fun, and I feel like I’m personally able to let loose a little bit more, and I find it more stressful to play in front of all of our friends at home, because I have to talk to them and see them a lot, so yeah, but it’s all fun, playing is fun,

Allison
Yeah, no, totally, I mean, it’s nice to network also, and just like meet a bunch of people that we listen to and who can’t come to Newfoundland because it’s really far and hard to get there if you’re a musician. We did play, yeah, The Ship the other night, and The Ship is a band we play all the time in Newfoundland, so.

Isobel
A venue. Yeah, we have a ship in St. John’s called just The Ship, so and we play there semi often, so it was fun to play at The Ship & Anchor in Calgary.

Luke
Yeah, it’s just nice to play away, because you get to play with bands that you don’t know and you haven’t necessarily heard before, and you know it’s great. Network is awesome.

Willow (CJSW)
Then, I wanted to talk a bit about your actual music, so your most recent single, Rick Nielsen, is a lot, I’d say it’s a lot lighter and more shoegazey than your EP. What made you decide to go for a different direction for the song?

Isobel
Well, on our first EP, there’s a song called Words Fail that is like a bit more of an emo song than like a true hardcore song, and I think when the EP came out, we were kind of surprised at how much people like responded to that one, and like, and loved it, and so I was thinking about that, and also I feel like, to be completely frankly honest, I feel like we listen to probably a lot more indie rock, like I love, like Dinosaur Jr., and like Alvvays, and like more like melodic rock, like that’s like my more personal listening taste. I do love hardcore and listen to a lot of hardcore too, and I always enjoy bands that kind of like mix heavy and soft and are able to move between the two, and as a, it’s fun as like a songwriter and performer to not to like have other, have some like dynamics to play with, and not always be like playing a similar tempo, or like, etcetera. So I feel like on the album there is definitely, there’s definitely some true, still like true to our roots, hardcore songs that for people who liked our more hardcore songs on the previous EP, but there is a lot more melodic kind of, yeah, more shoegazey, indie rocky vibes too.

Jacob
Yeah, yeah, I feel like it’s like, again, it’s like genre doesn’t really matter that much to us, so I feel like we’re kind of just making songs that we think sound good, and that’s kind of the only criteria.

Isobel
Yeah, I try, I don’t, I’ve tried to not think too much, especially in the process of like when we’re writing and stuff to not try to think too much about, like, ‘oh, like, is this finished product gonna work with x, y, and z?’ Like, I just want it to be, you know, feel true to us and be something we like to listen to at the end of the day.

Jacob
I feel like, also, like, to us, Sick Puppy is kind of like a vibe more than a sound, and, like, I feel like we’re listening to all kinds of music all the time, and we’ll hear a song, and we’ll be like, oh, this kind of has like this kind of sounds Sick Puppy, or like we’ll hear an album and it’s like oh this is a bit Sick Puppy, and it’s like sometimes it’s stuff that doesn’t sound the same at all, but it’s just like something about the the atmosphere of the music or the aesthetic of it, or whatever, that like kind of aligns with our, our personal tastes, but yeah, it all, it all kind of mixes together, and I feel like all of our songs sound like they’re by the same band, but they’re all kind of a bit different and a bit eclectic.

Isobel
They’re in the same universe, but not all the same country. That’s a good metaphor.

Willow (CJSW)
It’s been a couple years since you last released your EP. How has that time changed you guys as a band?

Isobel
Yeah, I mean, I feel like we’re just all kind of busy with other life stuff, and, like, to be quite frank, the band isn’t like our number one, we weren’t, we weren’t like we weren’t like hitting the studio being like ‘we need to finish this,’ so we definitely took our time, and I think that’s good, because we like, we really like the finished product, and I hope people do too, and yeah, we didn’t, we weren’t under like a time crunch or anything, so yeah,

Jacob
Yeah, we also like our new, and Luke is new to the band too, so we’ve kind of been like integrating more guitar parts and stuff, and like figuring out how things are going to sound that way, but we also like pretty much recorded this whole new album of ours ourselves, like we did the drums at our friend James’s studio,

Isobel
Shout out James.

Jacob
Yes, shout out James.

Isobel
Very Bad Times Club.

Jacob
Bad Times Club, the studio in St. John’s, the best, but yeah, we recorded drums there, but other than that, we like recorded everything on our own, kind of on our own schedule, in our own time, so it wasn’t really like we had like ‘we’re going into the studio this month, and we got to have the record done by the end of it.’ It was kind of like, okay, well, I think we have as much as we have done now. And then, in a couple months, when we have all the lyrics done, we’ll go back and do vocals, and then we’ll go add some more guitars, and then sit with it for a while, and see how we feel. And does this need anything else? And then we went back again, like a few weeks later, and added some more stuff, so yeah, we took our time, but I feel like for us it was worth it to just be confident and happy with the finished product.

Willow (CJSW)
Yeah, when is the album coming out?

Isobel
It is coming out July 24th, 2026.

Jacob
Yeah, the album’s called Nobody Gets Hurt, and yeah, it comes out July 24th. Streaming everywhere, I guess. We got tapes and CDs, and yeah, should be. I hope people enjoy it.

Willow (CJSW)
And I know some of you guys are in other music projects. How does that differ? How does playing with this band differ from playing with other projects?

Jacob
I mean, yeah, a lot of us play all kinds of music with all kinds of people, and I feel like this is maybe the band for all of us that is the most like kind of hanging out with our best friends, like we all are kind of spending time together all the time anyway, so it’s like different. Like I feel like Luke and I both play in a lot of bands where it’s kind of like it’s like a hired band to play somebody else’s music, so it’s like we show up, rehearse, and like play the show, but other than that, it’s kind of just like it’s like a job, we’re like working musicians, but this one is more of a, like, we’re all, yeah, we’re all more creative, we all go out for dinner afterwards and hang out, and yeah.

Isobel
Good vibes.

Jacob
Good vibes.

Allison
Yeah, Luke, do you have anything to say about that?

Luke
Or no, I mean, it’s great, you know, we’re all great friends, we, we get to hang out with each other and fuck around musically. It’s great.

Allison
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I used to play in a band called BBQT that played Sled Island, I think, eight years ago. I was trying to negotiate when it was, but at the time the like artist lounge was in the Calgary Tower, so however long ago that was, it was pretty funny, and I feel like I’ve always been, I played music growing up, but like violin, piano, Suzuki vibes, and I feel like learning to play music with my friends has been really nice, and we’re actively learning how to play the instruments as we grow as a band, so that has been, I think, definitely in the case of Isobel and I, the situation with this band, and it’s, you can actually feel like tangible progress, I would say, like from year to year, and like from the last time we played Sled till now, and that’s really gratifying and awesome.

Isobel
Yeah, and I think, yeah, and that, that, yeah, me and Allison, this is the first time we’re playing guitar and bass, respectively, in a band, and getting better at our instruments has definitely been part of the evolution of the sound and the songs, as well as we get better to play

Allison
Isobel and I lived together during the pandemic, and just like started playing in our basement.

Isobel
Yes, we started learning then.

Allison
It’s grown from there. But Jacob and Luke are like very professional musicians, I would say.

Isobel
They’re our gurus.

Allison
So yeah, in that way, I think it’s a bit of a contrast, but yeah, I think this band is just, it’s a lot of fun and relief, I would say, for frustration.

Isobel
Yeah, fun, goofy, happy vibes, yeah.

Willow (CJSW)
So, how does the songwriting process, like for lyrics and stuff, look compared to writing for other musical projects and things like short stories? Because I know some of you write.

Isobel
Yes, Allison, short story author. Yeah, I’d say it’s a little bit different, it’s definitely different song to song, I’d say most of our songs are usually like me coming up with a guitar riff I really like and Jacob is really good at like taking some ideas like that and helping like build a real song around it, and yeah, and then I’m writing, I’m writing some lyrics for sure, and I’m writing all the lyrics, and that’s a bit of fun for me, and some songs are like, some songs are like lyrics first and music after, some songs are very music first and lyrics extremely last minute before we record, because I’m having a long time coming up with them, but yeah, so it’s definitely very song to song, but yeah, it’s all, it’s all pretty, pretty low stress. Jacob, do you have anything to say?

Jacob
No, I feel like that’s pretty much it. Like, yeah, we, I feel like we kind of start building the arrangement, and the lyrics come as that’s happening, but I don’t know. I think this band is fun too, because some of the lyrics are like very kind of, you know, sincere poetic, like very… what’s the word I’m looking for… like vulnerable, and also very like eloquent, but then there’s songs that are like super tongue in cheek, and like definitely supposed to have humor, humor to them, and it’s like, I mean, I think that some of the best bands can do that really well, and like toeing the line between humor and seriousness, I feel like makes everything feel a bit more authentic, because I don’t think there’s that many people in the world that are like 100% serious or 100% funny all the time.

Isobel
True, true, that.

Willow (CJSW)
All right. So, my last question is, do you have any plans for the band after Sled?

Isobel
Well, we are, we’re gonna have an album release in St. John’s the day after the album comes out with all of our friends, and that’ll be really nice, and then, yeah, and then we’ll see what happens after. It would be nice to book a tour. We do this, we have some like life stuff going on outside of the band at the moment, so that touring is kind of on the back burner at the moment, but it will happen.

Allison
Especially the like Toronto, Montreal.

Isobel
Yeah, we need to hit up Montreal for sure. We got a lot of buddies there that are inquiring.

Allison
As previously mentioned. It’s like touring from Newfoundland is really hard.

Isobel
Yeah, getting off the island is hard.

Allison
You have to take a ferry, and then you have to drive. You have to drive across the island, then you have to take an overnight ferry, then you have to drive from Sydney, Nova Scotia, to wherever you’re playing, so it’s like you really gotta make it work.

Isobel
It requires a… it requires a bit more planning and organization than touring on the mainland.

Jacob
Than just hopping in a van.

Isobel
So yeah, but it will happen.

Allison
But when we can make it work, it will happen.

Isobel
It’ll happen, and at the end of the day, I think, all I need to prioritize this as being fun first, and if everything can stay fun and like non-stressful, then that’s that is what feels right to me and to us. So, yeah, that’s the most important thing.

Jacob
Yeah, I feel like we’ll probably also just like it’s been such a, like, we said, it’s been four years since we put out our last album, and we’ve kind of been writing songs like consistently that whole time, and so I feel like as new stuff is coming along, we’ll probably just keep working on new stuff too, so even if we don’t end up touring heavily behind this album, we’ll probably just start working on another one afterwards, or see what happens. Hopefully, it gets some plays on campus and community radio stations, like CJSW.

Isobel
Shout out community radio. St. John’s just took a hit on that front.

Jacob
Yeah, we just lost our campus radio station, or lost their funding, I think. So we’re hoping they pull through, and we’re always happy to see a radio station like this that’s still doing well.

Willow (CJSW)
Well, I’m sure it will be played on CJSW. Thank you guys so much for talking with me. I appreciate it.

Jacob
Yeah, thank you for having us.

Isobel
Thank you CJSW.

Allison
We love you, Calgary.