From Mundane to Meaningful with La Sécurité

It’s special when the more mundane parts of day-to-day life as a human can be transformed through the lyrics and bouncy feeling you get from a post-punk tune. The themes and groove enmeshed in Montreal-based art-punk collective La Sécurité have a way of layering dull events with the relationships that make being human not-half bad after all.

“I enjoy using these very simplistic images as the base layer and then add all these hidden meanings that mean things to me,” La Sécurité’s Éliane Viens-Synnott begins to share over a Zoom call that catches her early in the day with a cup of coffee in hand. “ I'm thinking about it more now because we're wrapping up the second album,” she adds, ahead of the band's forthcoming visit to the capital at the end of August for Edinburgh Psych Fest.

Following the release of their debut album Stay Safe! in 2023, late last year La Sécurité released its follow-up single Detour, which crashed into fans' ears with a focus on the drag those of us who drive are forced to deal with: traffic. The single is a local spotlight on the band's homebase, as Viens-Synnott shares, however her lyricism about meandering around the city’s back roads shines a positive light on the subject: 'There is a road, a short break / But the detour is more scenic'.

“There's just constantly roads closed and the joy of the summer is finding a detour when you're driving somewhere,”  Viens-Synnott explains, detailing how she then builds the song from her simple image of just finding a way to get where you’re going; “ life challenges, being there for one another and staying patient.” Her lyrics are able to humanise experiences usually felt as such an everyday burden.

Even more indicative of the way Viens-Synnott is able to explore the most human of experiences, most importantly our relationships to one another, she shares that, “the band was started with Félix and I as a partnership and now we're friends. So there's this dynamic that we're exploring through the second record.” La Sécurité is a super-group made up of Montreal musicians who started the collective as a side-project during the pandemic. 

Alongide bassist Félix Bélisle, who is also the lead singer of Montreal’s  Choses Sauvages, Viens-Synnott is the lead singer of La Sécurité. She says that “there [are] variations. I'm a drummer as well, so sometimes I'll hop on the drums and Kenny [Smith] will play guitar and it'll totally change the vibe. On the new record, the girls are more present, they each have one song that they sing on.” Laurence-Anne Charest-Gagné has a solo pop project and in La Sécurité plays guitar. Kenny Smith is a multi-instrumentalist and when she's not playing guitar for the band, Melissa Di Menna runs a screen printing company that prints half the merch for Montreal bands. Di Menna is also an artist and has created all the artwork for the records, posters, and merch La Sécurité has put out. 

Ketchup, La Sécurité's newest single is a cathartic takedown of one of the most hated exchanges between strangers and friends alike: small-talk. It can be annoying and sometimes it can be cute; however most of the time it’s just a habit we’re obliged to perform. As Viens-Synnott scat sings in French, she has an equally sassy, angry and sarcastic cadence, reminiscent of Kathleen Hanna’s The Julie Ruin era. 

Viens-Synnott’s Canadian roots have equipped her with multiple language skills. Her bilingual talents are obvious from Ketchup being sung completely in French, along with the French and English heard across Stay Safe! “ I'm bilingual since childhood, but I'm probably the only [band member] that's most comfortable writing in English. If we're writing something together we'll do it in French and I'll tend to have weird grammatical things come up when I speak.” These grammatical oddities Viens-Synnott refers to can be attributed to her doing her secondary schooling in English. 

When writing collectively, La Sécurité are able to create wordplay that wouldn’t be able to happen otherwise. Viens-Synnott explains that “they'll tune it up a little for me and that's how we've come up with weird expressions or lines that aren't exactly said in either language. That's just the beauty of Montreal.”

There’s a diversity to how La Sécurité creates. When the collective work collaboratively they put together these wonderful grammatical puzzles. The majority of the time though, little scraps of paper become a canvas for Viens-Synnott to create songs when she’s out and about and her phone dies. “For words, I have all these little notebooks and pieces of napkins.” She goes on to share the regularity of these occurrences: “I'm notorious for having my phone dying wherever I am. Whenever my phone dies, I'll just write on whatever I find.” While La Sécurité will only be in Edinburgh for 24 hours to play Psych Fest, who knows, maybe our city's napkins can be the starting place for the collective's third album.

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La Sécurité play Edinburgh Psych Fest, 31 Aug
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