Prism Shores’ Softest Attack feels like a DIY jangle-pop record built from familiar ingredients – Lemonheads-style melodic punch and a faintly Canadian sense of space. Scotty Munro’s methodical production helps turn the album from nostalgia to a present-tense story of hesitation, introspection and hard-found footing. 

FAMILIAR INGREDIENTS

Prism Shores’ Softest Attack is a record made from familiar ingredients, but it is not content to simply retread old ground – it is nostalgic without being a dedication to sounds of the past. Prism Shores, with their third album, clearly draw from the melodic punch of the Lemonheads and the more expansive, chiming sonic disposition of the Boo Radleys, yet it also feels rooted in a very specific place and focus.

Hailing, proudly, from Montreal, there is a Canadian spaciousness running through these songs, a sense of distance that gives the record its emotional contour. Even when the music is at its brightest and most propulsive, there is usually some lyrical narrative of isolation, hope, or unease keeping it from drifting into easy nostalgia. Scotty Munro was brought in to produce the album and smartly balances the jaunty jangle-pop with some of the bad’s shoegaze simplicity. That tension is part of what makes the album so compelling.

Softest Attack does not present itself as a grand unveiling, but as a carefully assembled collection of songs of identity, made with heart, insecurity, and a strong sense of purpose. It is a DIY record in the best sense: not rough for the sake of it, but full of instinct. The band’s melodies arrive wrapped in distortion, jangle and a haze of friction, yet the songs never lose shape. If anything, the slightly frayed edges help the material feel more lived-in, more immediate and more emotionally believable.

Jangle Grunge and Everything Inbetween

Much of the balance between grunge-led jangle and lyrical narration is down to Scotty Munro’s production. The record sounds purposeful without ever feeling polished , with guitars layered and interlocked in ways that make the songs feel solid with sturdy bass and rhythm, yet at the same time somewhat unsettled. The band, alongside Munro, seems to understand that the power of this material lies in the balance of brightness against grit and harmony against jangled strain.

The result is a sound that feels carefully built but still organic, as though the album is constantly discovering its own form with each lesson. That sense of construction suits the band well, because Softest Attack often feels like a document of a group tightening its identity rather than simply repeating the ingredients and steps from their previous albums.

IDENTITY SIGNALLING

The opening stretch of tracks makes the identity-signalling especially clear. Opener, Kid Gloves, is a sharp and convincing opener, its crashing pulse setting out the album’s key parameters from the outset. It is restless, brisk and confident, but also slightly unstable, as if the band is opening by testing the limits of its own energy. Lying in Wait follows with a brighter, more jangly resonance, and that shift gives the album one of its most appealing early contrasts. Then I Didn’t Mean To Change sharpens the picture further, leaning into a more languid vocal delivery that sits beautifully against the song’s deeper melodic ache. In those early tracks, Prism Shores establish the central trick of the record with forward momentum feeling a little uncertain, and they make that uncertainty sound melodic.

Gossamer comes alive almost immediately, driven by sneering guitar and a deliberate, almost alarming energy. Idle Again feels like a grower, but also a pivot point, where the jangle-indie core begins to open out into something more chaotic and emotionally unstable. By the time Magical Thinking arrives, the record is breathing with more strain and force, here there are crashing drums and a guitar lead that gradually bursts through the surface. These songs sequence well as they feel like stages in a mood change from optimism into something more introspective, fractured and exposed.

Manitoban Storytelling

The lyrics reinforce that emotional journey. There is a recurring sense of self-doubt, hesitation and the difficult act of trying to locate and identify oneself in a wide-open space. Lines like “Showed up like a bad imposter, had one convinced at all” and “I wrestled with the doubt, I was dragged out of time,” give the album a bruised inner life that matches its restlessness. Elsewhere, the writing opens out into wider geography and distance, especially in Nothing To Find, where the image of smoke drifting right over us evokes both place and disconnection. That Canadian dimension works well: the songs feel shaped by a landscape of space, separation and emotional weather, where distance is not just physical but psychological too. 

There are also moments where the band’s confidence in arrangement comes into sharper focus. Guidebook is one of the strongest examples of Prism Shores’ ability to merge textures without letting the songs collapse into a chaotic blur. Guidebook boasts a bass riff sitting neatly against jangling guitar, and the track builds toward a frantic outro that feels earned rather than decorative. Resigned To The Fact leans more heavily on jangling guitar as melodic spine, but again the ending pushes into something more chaotic, as if the song cannot help revealing the tension it has been carrying all along. Twist The Knife closes the album on a more tender note, blending some of the record’s best qualities into a song that feels like release without resolution. It is one of the clearest examples of how the band can sound vulnerable without softening their edges.

Shimmering C90 Cassette Case

What makes Softest Attack work so well is that it never loses sight of its emotional centre. This is an album built on strong songs, but also on a sense of a care for who this band identify as. The performances feel collaborative and communal, with the multiple vocal leads adding to the sense that this is a band process rather than a solo vision. Yet Munro’s production holds everything together with admirable discipline, giving the album its lift, its bite and its coherence. The result is a record that feels both tight and expansive: a DIY project with heart at its forefront, brought to life through production choices that sharpen rather than smooth away its character.

Softest Attack succeeds because it understands that revival is not the same thing as repetition; we’ve seen this with the recent explosion of Geese and that unrefined sound to counter against the algorithm polished sound that dominates airwaves. Prism Shores work within a well-established indie-pop lineage, but they make it feel personal, grounded and emotionally present. The songs are full of tension, melody and movement, but also of distance, doubt and the uneven contours of place. That combination gives the album real depth. It may nod to the past, but it sounds alive in the present, and that is what gives it its staying power. Softest Attack is out now through Meritoro Records. 

Prism Shores: Bandcamp

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