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Like most of life’s significant events (birth! death! a pretty sunset!), the passage of time is wild in some ways, but in others totally unremarkable: it’s a thing that just happens. All of a sudden you’re older than your doctor or the police officer on the corner, and ruminating on all the years that have piled up in between can unconsciously become some sort of strange hobby.

The sense of wistful nostalgia that wafts through Canadian pop group p:ano’s 2002 debut album ‘When It’s Dark and It’s Summer’ is also present on their new record ‘ba ba ba’ - their first release in 19 years. But this time around, the ambient sense of childhood memories and the listless melancholy of suburban teenagerdom is flash-forwarded to the concerns of middle age - basically looking back and being like “what was all that even?”

In the winter of 2023, prompted by an invitation to contribute a song to a Zum Audio 25th-Anniversary compilation, Nick Krgovich, Larissa Loyva, Justin Kellam and Julia Chirka were together again doing something oddly familiar, that in retrospect they had also done while they were shockingly young. There are recordings of p:ano rehearsals from both then and now, filled with the same giggles and sense of camaraderie - only this time the flailing and wonkiness of people in their 20s is looked on with the curiosity and tenderness of people firmly planted in their 40s and 50s. Most significantly, they’re making music simply because they enjoy each other’s company and are having a good time doing it.

In a way, this makes the self-released ‘ba ba ba’ a true example of what outsider art can be in 2024 - something made for fun, without any pressure or ambition to rejoin the wheel of the music world. This freedom also informs the music itself, which tumbled out with ease and reverently bows to the music they were blasting in Nick’s 1981 Volvo back in the early aughts.

There’s a Billy Joel album called ‘An Innocent Man’ where apparently? each song is an homage to pop music from the piano man’s childhood. It was not planned, but ‘ba ba ba’ is essentially p:ano’s take on that concept, resulting in a heartfelt and celebratory swirl of the music they loved in their formative years, leaning into the similarities to groups like Yo La Tengo, Low, Belle & Sebastian, The Magnetic Fields, or Stereolab like you would a big hug.

Nich Wilbur recorded the basic tracks to tape last November at The Unknown in Anacortes, WA, and returning to Vancouver, the group finished the album themselves in a little field house in a neighbourhood park. Old friends stopped by to contribute, many of whom also played on the early p:ano records, and here everyone was again laughing and tripping over cables and dealing with crackling headphones just like old times. The results were mixed in a few days in Toronto by Nick’s frequent collaborator Joseph Shabason.

A lot of the record is set in Coquitlam, the Vancouver suburb where Nick and Larissa formed the group while still in high school. The songs on that first album were also packed with images of their hometown but when that album came out in 2002, Coquitlam was still full of rundown mid-century strip malls and modest family homes with swaying cedar trees towering above. Some of that is still there, but a lot of it is getting crunched up and turned into high-rises with a physiotherapy clinic and Chipotle on the ground floor.

‘ba ba ba’ is made out of unwieldy observations about these kinds of changes - impressions about being alive with friends and family and loved ones from the vantage of a very different time, and filtering it all with a sense of bewilderment and gratitude for the here and now. All in its own funny way, and most notably, all for love.

p:ano were formed in 1999 by Nick Krgovich and Larissa Loyva while still in high school. Joined by Julia Chirka and Justin Kellam they have made five albums - with an 19 year gap between the last two. They are happy to be back playing music together again.