Imagine thousands of fireworks exploding in a radical display of colors on a perfectly temperature-d summer night. Now, imagine you’re sitting next to the person you love most, while realizing your time on Earth will be over one day. This colorful picture of a scene is exactly how I felt listening to the band Mother Mother for the first time.
I first heard the Canadian band Mother Mother one random day while mindlessly browsing through the app TikTok. I have heard hundreds, maybe even thousands, of sounds on the app and normally they don’t mean much to me – but this was different. The track was the song Hayloft, a song that has over 52 million streams on Spotify, and was a chart topper in their native country. The song has a tension to it that felt like something I’ve never heard before, and the instrumental guitar riffs sound like something you could hear in a stadium rock show. Combining dark lyrical content with bright and poppy vocals is a move of genius that just works. I immediately fell in love with the track, and needed to know more about the group. I never would’ve guessed what was coming next.
After doing a quick Google search of Mother Mother, I found that many of their songs were popular on TikTok simply because they have such a unique sound that can match the quirky energy of the app almost perfectly. Feeling frustrated in a way, because how could such amazing music exist without my knowledge? Especially for someone who spends day and night listening to music, it seemed almost impossible that I had never even heard of the band before. It seemed this was the case for many of the bands new fans, as there was even a Rolling Stone write-up written in October titled `TikTok is giving a niche indie band’s 2008 music millions of new streams’ which just goes to show how many other like-minded people there are – and not just myself.
After listening to the darkly beautiful and twisted track ‘Hayloft’, I was soon pulled into tracks like the hauntingly mellow sounds of ‘Ghosting’, the rushed eerieness of ‘Oh Ana’, and the echo-ed Romeo-and-Juliet love track ‘Arms Tonite’. As a musician I have been trying to wrap my head around the guitar work and vocal harmonies, and luckily for myself, the main singer and guitarist Ryan Guldemond makes lots of videos on TikTok showing tutorials on how to play their classic tracks.
The phenomenon of Mother Mother’s music exploding into popularity is a fairly common story now with social media – there are many bands who didn’t feel that their music was very popular when it came out, but are gaining hundreds of thousands of fans on social media platforms. Social media might be harmful in some ways, but being able to interact with fans so intimately is such a unique experience. You never know what social media can do for you as a musician. Your music may go undiscovered for years until one person plays a song and you could become a sensation overnight. This simply wouldn’t have happened twenty years ago.
In the year 2020, when most artists are struggling to interact with fans in a meaningful way with no live performances, Mother Mother have gained more fans than they ever had in the past. They were relatively popular in Canada, and had a couple tracks do well in the U.K. a couple of years ago, but now in 2020 with no new albums out they are as popular as ever. For a year that has so many struggling, they have had the best year of all time as a band. The band has even been quoted to have said that their music simply was too weird for radio when a lot of the tracks came out, but now the younger generation loves it and they have become internet sensations.
My deep dive into a new favorite band turned into a full story of how social media can impact the music industry very positively. Mother Mother are thriving, and will now have so many lifelong fans because of TikTok users finding amazing ways to showcase their tracks. There may be some things wrong with social media, but this is heartwarming seeing amazing artists getting the recognition they deserve. I would write more, but I’m off to go listen to some more of their music and to learn their songs on guitar!