On the necessity of imperfection and unknowns

In the stillness of rural Canada, Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre started sundayclub as a way of processing and capturing the curiosities and complexities of coming into one’s own. Their self-titled debut album, released in July 2026 from Paper Bag Records, was created over a four-year-long process that began in the basement bedroom of Carmichael’s family home. They describe the album, and their music in general, as “dreamy, gut punch pop.”

How did the two of you start making music together? Were either of you making music or other art before you met?

Nikki St. Pierre: When I was eight, I found a guitar in my grandma’s closet—some old ’70s-looking guitar–and I taught myself to play. I started producing in my preteen years when EDM was really big. [Courtney and I] met in university because I was helping her and her sister produce some demos for a folk festival’s young performers program. Her sister stopped pursuing it once it became more serious, but [Courtney and I] didn’t stop making music together.

Courtney Carmichael: I always had music in my life. I grew up taking lessons—piano lessons, vocal lessons, guitar lessons. I played at home in my room and with my sister. We did a lot of busking. I also played occasionally in my family’s polka band, which is a very stereotypical prairie thing to do, especially if you’re of Ukrainian or Polish descent. You always have someone who can play accordion or violin in the family.

Nikki St. Pierre: A lot of your experience was live, very outward, and mine was really internal. The sundayclub shows were some of my first shows ever. I spent 15 years in my bedroom.

Courtney Carmichael: Meanwhile, I had been performing since I was 12. As soon as I could play the guitar, I was out playing.

Did you [Courtney] have a lot to teach [Nikki] about performing?

CC: Not really. I don’t feel like the live performing that I was doing applied to sundayclub. I had to relearn how to perform because it’s different playing covers and trying to entertain people in that way versus now. You’re on stage; you’re starting from ground zero because nobody knows your songs. They hadn’t even been released yet.

Nikki, you said you were into EDM and Courtney, you were more folk?

CC: Folk, country, pop.

How did you develop the sound for sundayclub together, coming from those different genres?

NSP: Our foray into indie happened at the same time. I had little sprinkles of it here and there. I was into emo and metalcore. I thought I was going to see a band called Tokio Hotel, and I accidentally bought a ticket to Tokyo Police Club, who’s released on Paper Bag, our label. So I saw this indie show, and I was like, “Whoa. What is this music?” I got into Metric and Alvvays around the same time that we met. We explored all of that together.

Has your sound been consistent throughout the time you’ve been working together?

CC: We were talking about this last night. There have been so many evolutions of sundayclub. From the beginning, we were picking up on a lot of what we were listening to, but you wouldn’t know by listening to the music now what we were listening to in 2020 or 2021. We go through so many iterations of the songs, going in different directions, taking a lot of time to reproduce things.

NSP: We got lucky. We had friends that were not lucky, but we were lucky with the pandemic because it gave us the time and space we needed to find what we sounded like. The “Sad Summer” demo remained largely unchanged from the moment that we wrote it and produced it to five years later, when it was released on the record.

CC: But other songs—”Camera Shy,” “Corydon [Ave (To Meet You)]“—those had many iterations.

NSP: Many. “woym?” had five fully produced different versions across four different DAWs.

How do you decide when a song is done?

CC: When you like it more than you hate it. Just by a little bit.

NSP: Is a song ever done?

CC: No.

NSP: We had had the album mastered for almost a year, and this was what, a couple months ago?

CC: In the wintertime.

NSP: Then we were like, “‘Corydon’s’ not done.” And we had to open this project file that we hadn’t touched in a year. We added five layers of guitar parts. The song is never really done. It just gets released, and you make the decision: This is done enough.

When I read about sundayclub, you mentioned creating something “imperfect.” Is that an intention of yours, or does that feel inherent to any creative process?

NSP: We made this record before Suno and all the AI tools. Now I find I’m able to use that as an analogy. You hear the stuff that comes out of AI, and it sounds perfect. And there’s no soul in it. It’s the little things that are weird, that accidentally happen, or the mistakes in a song, that make it special. In “Blue Wave,” there’s a single guitar track that [Courtney] played. I was playing with a space echo as she was playing, and it’s whack. It’s all over the place. But as soon as you take that out of the song, the heart of it disappears.

CC: I feel like we had in our mind that we wanted to make this perfect record.

NSP: Polished.

CC: But about halfway through, we realized that perfect means imperfect. You can’t have a “perfect” album because if it’s overly refined, you can’t feel anything behind it. It feels fake. I’m not the best guitar player, so I would play some wacky stuff. And we kept it. I think it added character.

NSP: I remember when she started doing things like that, I was like, “What are you playing? Okay, whatever. I’ll record you doing this. I’ll just mute it later.” But every single time, I ended up thinking, “There’s something special here, I have to keep it.” Every single time.

It’s interesting what you said about AI-produced music sounding perfect, in a way. Because it’s not human. So what do you define as “perfect,” in that case, if it’s not actually what you want?

CC: Perfectly imperfect.

I was also interested in the description of your music as “dreamy, gut punch pop.” Those descriptors seem in conflict with each other.

CC: I think “dreamy” refers to the music and the atmosphere that the album has. The “gut punch” refers to the lyrics hitting you in the gut—striking this emotional place that maybe people don’t think about, or it hits you all at once, unexpectedly.

NSP: If you break our music down into three parts, it’s melody and lyric, melodic instruments, and the rhythm. The rhythm section is pretty hard-hitting when you really listen to it. You can hear my pop punk and emo influences. The synths and guitars are dreamy. I didn’t necessarily mean for them to be, but they ended up super washy. And [Courtney’s] lyrics and melodies are so haunting.

CC: We have a hard time with genre because we usually simplify it and just say we’re pop or indie pop. Indie rock doesn’t feel right. Dream pop doesn’t feel right either because we are a bit more on the rock side of things. It’s funny how people are giving it those extra adjectives. “Dreamy, gut punch pop” was something we read in an article a year ago, somebody describing our sound better than we ever have. We’ve been using it ever since.

When you’re trying to define what your music is, the more specific it gets, the narrower the box you’re in. Maybe it’s more accurate, but then you have less room to grow. Who are you trying to reach with your music, and what are you hoping to give to them?

NSP: When I’m making it, it’s for me.

CC: I was going to say, first I have to appease myself. If this is something I would be interested in listening to, that I wouldn’t cringe at—although it’s hard to not cringe at your own work. It’s taken a long time to be able to differentiate: Is this something I’m not liking just because I’m doing it, that other people would think is fine?

NSP: If you connect with it, someone else will also feel something. It’s inherently human to know that there’s another group of people out there that feel the same way you do.

CC: I do picture a demographic of people about our age, maybe deep thinkers or people who have a tendency to feel sad or to feel really hard. But our main demographic so far has widened from what I thought it was going to be.

How so?

CC: I expected more of the university crowd and more female or feminine-presenting people. But it’s turning out to be more male listeners. Also older.

NSP: I’m getting all the guitar guys.

CC: And then younger.

NSP: Teenagers.

CC: Anywhere from 12 to 50. It’s kind of both ends of the spectrum versus the 18- to 24-year-olds that we expected.

NSP: They still make up for about 30 percent, but I thought it was going to be closer to 60 or 70.

The other thing I wanted to talk to you about was this concept of pre-nostalgia, which you described. How did that become an important concept to you?

CC: It’s a trippy thing. I didn’t have a name for it until recently. It wasn’t until we were finalizing the album that I noticed this thread throughout: That feeling of being in a moment and already knowing you’re going to miss it and ruining the moment because you’re already worried about it passing. That’s something I’ve always done. I get hyped up for exciting things and then fall hard when they’re over and get sad. I guess I put things on a pedestal. I learned that term [pre-nostalgia] as we were writing the track by tracks for the album. I searched “feeling that you’re missing the moment or sad in the moment, but it hasn’t passed.” And it’s like, “What your feeling is pre-nostalgia.” And I’m like, “Yes, this is it.”

Is that something you’ve also felt, Nikki?

NPS: I get hit with it in a different way. When she’s feeling it, it’s very sad. I get happy and overwhelmed. I’ll get misty and go, “Oh my god, this is such a great memory already.”

CC: You get happy because you’re in the moment and enjoying it. I’m thinking about how sad I’m going to be when it’s over, and that bleeds into the present.

Nostalgia itself can be a happier or sadder thing, so I imagine the present nostalgia could also feel either way. Have you had people tell anything to you about what your music has meant to them that’s been especially gratifying or surprised you?

CC: The album came out not even a month ago, so it’s still new for a lot of people. We’ve only experienced that during this past short tour that we did, a couple dates in Eastern Canada: Ottawa, Montreal, Hamilton, and Toronto. That was the first time that we had people—it wasn’t necessarily telling us how much the songs mean—but already picking out their favorites. We can tell that there are people in the crowd who are singing along, who know the words.

NSP: We have been fortunate to get feedback from interviewers and journalists who have been listening to the record for six months already who say, “This sounds like how I remember when I was a teenager in the ’90s.” Those [reactions] are crazy to us because how are you thankful to listen to our music? I’m happy you’re listening to it.

I wonder if that’s also why it’s reached the older audience: because they have that nostalgia for how it sounds. Whereas people closer to our age weren’t alive in the ’90s.

CC: That’s so true.

NSP: We just played the Shoegaze Festival in Toronto, and that crowd picked up on everything. The energy in that crowd was palpable.

CC: That was our first time having people line up for merch and to talk to us.

What were your shows like before the album came out?

NSP: Still good, still great. But now people know what to expect. They know when the lift is coming. They know how to move. They know the words. You get that much more engagement out of the crowd because they’re not trying to figure out the song as they’re watching you.

CC: We’ve played some of these songs since 2022, and for the vast majority of it, nothing was released.

I was at a show recently where the band I was there to see only had one song that had been released. I didn’t know what they were going to play. It is different because otherwise you’re at a show and the first bar of a song starts, and everyone already knows what it is.

CC: Or even just the possibility of looking you up after. How many years we played where we had songs that people were stoked about and then couldn’t go find them? We were always worried: Are we going to lose those people? Are they going to wait? Because we’re not going to let that rush us to get this album done.

Are there different things you want to try with your music going forward, as far as the sound, lyrics, or as musicians in the world?

NSP: This record was made under a microscope. We want to get loud, at least in the studio. It might not sound any different on the record, but in the studio, it’s going to feel different.

CC: I want to start using more analog gear. We started to incorporate that toward the end of the first album.

NSP: We’re not worried about “Can we make a good record?” We’re not worried about “Are we recording this vocal right? Are we recording this guitar right?” We’re not second-guessing the mechanics of it anymore, so we’re able to just do. I think that will bleed into the next record.

CC: I’m looking also to expand the subject matter and experiment with weirder vocal textures.

What kind of subjects are you thinking of exploring?

CC: I don’t know yet. It has to come in the moment. I can feel my own perspective has changed significantly since we made the first album already. That will naturally expand what I want to sing about.

What kind of analog gear are you hoping to use in the future?

CC: More amps. Louder amps.

NSP: Louder amps, bigger amps. Hardware synths instead of software synths. I had an entirely digital guitar rig, but after some technical issues on tour, I’ve switched us both to analog boards. It goes back to the unpredictableness of everything. How much more unknown can we inject into a new record? How crazy can we get with it?