Daniel Sveinson of Brass Camel (who does electric guitar and vocals) speaks to us about the backstory to the band’s latest album, Brass Camel (2026):

Being in Brass Camel presents so many situations which, at first glance, may seem almost paradoxical. The music is funky, yet it’s proggy. It’s dead serious at times and bewilderingly light-headed the very next minute. Onstage the band walks a tightrope between a striving for clinical precision and an ability to let loose like a psychedelic jam band. It is a culmination of these various balancing acts that makes the Camel an incredibly rewarding, fun band to be a part of and I believe it’s also why we can be a tough group to put a finger on. All too often we’re presented with an evaluation, be it a concert/album review or just a quick comment, along the lines of “I haven’t seen anything quite like that, what would you even call that type of music? Is it prog? Is it funk rock? Is it heavy metal?” and that’s what excites us – there are no rules with this band. We’re just Brass Camel and that can mean whatever you want it to mean.

Since January 2023, when we really become a “band” with the addition of two crucial members, we have crossed Canada four times and it has been so energising to see more and more people coming to shows and responding to the music. We recorded our second album, “Camel” in 2024 and began planning a 6 week tour to support its release in April of 2025. With a bit of a slower touring pace in the winter of 2024 after a relentless year-and-a-half of playing live, I was determined to spend more time than ever writing music and that’s what I did. Every day I would head to the studio in the morning and start working on songs and before long there was a huge amount of raw material to sift through. It was exciting because for the first time we were looking forward at a recording made up of entirely new material – nothing that had been lingering around for two or three years before making it into the studio. We began going over songs and demos with the idea that we would record them in late 2025. 

We had made friends with the amazing people in Crown Lands while on tour in late 2024, after Kevin (Comeau) had come to our show at Toronto’s Longboat Hall. He invited us to hang out at the beautiful Chalet Studios in Uxbridge on an off day, which we gladly took him up on, and in a few hours of talking about music and jamming on deep cuts like Genesis’s “The Battle of Epping Forest” we hit it off like kindred spirits. We had to be back on the road for the westbound journey home but we all agreed it would be great to return to the Chalet and, if nothing else, hang out and possibly record some live session video.

Fast forwarding a few months, I get talking with Kevin about our tour plans and mention that we’ve got a lot of new material that will make it to a third album one day. One thing leads to another and a plan was hatched to accelerate the schedule dramatically – instead of waiting until the fall and recording on our own time, we would stop into Uxbridge while on tour in Ontario and track a ten song LP in between shows on the weekend. It felt like a monumental challenge but we’ve never been ones to do things the easy way so we locked it in and got to work fleshing out these songs that would be recorded with Kevin at the helm as engineer and co-producer.

“Brass Camel” is, appropriately, the first Brass Camel record that I feel sounds like a Brass Camel record. We’ve spent god knows how many hours in a bus together, in studio together and onstage together and I’d like to believe that is reflected in this collection of songs and recordings. We were focused, driven and motivated throughout the process and can’t wait to play these songs live all over the country and, later this year, in Europe (and hopefully the UK). This album is more lyrically dense – there’s a higher word count here than our first two LPs put together – and more musically ambitious, weirder and yet somehow more accessible than our previous efforts. There are a lot of subtleties and easter eggs hidden in the arrangements which I hope will make each listen more entertaining than the last! When it’s funk, it’s funkier. When it’s proggy, it’s proggier. When it’s loud, it’s louder. When it’s quiet, it’s quieter. There’s a lot more of a lot more but it’s all Brass Camel. Hope you enjoy it.