No Expectations 110: Deadhead
A Taste Profile interview with Foxwarren’s Andy Shauf and Avery Kissick. Plus, new LPs from Moontype and Florry.
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Headline song: Foxwarren, “Deadhead”
Thanks for being here. You might think this is another newsletter about the Grateful Dead, but fear not, it’s actually on the great Canadian band Foxwarren. They have a new record out Friday and are interviewed below. The standout on 2, their forthcoming sophomore LP, is called “Deadhead.”
As always, you can sign up for a paid subscription or tell a friend about a band you read about here. It’s still $5 a month—the cost of one Old Style plus tip at Rainbo Club. Every bit helps, keeps this project going, and allows it to stay paywall-free. It’s rough out there, so I’m grateful you’re still reading and supporting this writing project. Next week, I’m planning on running a mid-year roundup of the Best Albums of 2025 So Far. I normally publish that list in early July because that’s the actual halfway mark of the year, but I like to take off most of December to rest and recharge, so it makes sense to compile it all in June.
Taste Profile: Foxwarren’s Andy Shauf and Avery Kissick
Andy Shauf has been in my regular rotation of artists for well over a decade now. I first heard his epically rendered early LP The Bearer of Bad News in 2013, when my then-editor at the A.V. Club, Marah Eakin, recommended him, and was stunned by the Canadian songwriter’s immersive storytelling, winsome tenor, and meticulous arrangements. That LP was reissued in 2015, which made for 2016’s The Party, a dense but accessible collection of novella-like tunes that take place at a singular house party. He followed that up with an equally ambitious, character-driven LP in 2020’s The Neon Skyline, which served as an autopsy of a relationship through the lens of a neighborhood Toronto bar. (I wrote the press bio for that one.)
While I consider The Party and The Neon Skyline as two of the finest LPs of the past decade, the one I’ve returned to most regularly is Foxwarren’s self-titled debut from 2018. That was Shauf’s early band, formed years before his solo efforts with childhood friends. Where his songwriting under his name had been intricate, interconnected, and tightly packed, these songs felt loose, spacious, and comfortable. Where both projects are unassailably stellar, this band always felt more digestible and sunny. Seven years later (four years following an also-great but less story-oriented 2021 LP from Shauf called Wilds and two years following a more story-oriented LP from Shauf called Norm), Foxwarren are back with 2, a radical reinvention of the live-on-the-floor palette they mined for their first one. Here, thanks to remote sessions, warped musical ideas, and deconstructing their own process, a multitude of samples pepper the songs. It’s glitchy, occasionally unmooring, but always fascinating. It’s somehow as seamless and infectious as their first one, too. When you listen to a songwriter as thoughtful and perfectionist as Shauf, it’s a blast to hear him clearly have so much fun on record.
With 2 out tomorrow, I decided to get Shauf back on the phone, along with drummer Avery Kissick, for a Taste Profile interview. Their picks were introspective, illuminating, and pitch-perfect for this series. Below, check out each of their three formative things in their life and the three things they’re obsessed with right now.
Andy’s Formative Movie: That Thing You Do! (1996)
We have 12 things to talk about, so let's get into it. Andy, you chose That Thing You Do!, which is a favorite. When did you first see this movie?
Andy Shauf: I saw it with family friends, and the dad of that family was a drummer, and his son was a drummer. I was a drummer, too, so there was this unspoken kind of drummer bond thing happening. That movie just really unlocked for me the whole idea of music, starting a band, and playing in a garage. I grew up playing drums in church with my dad leading worship. When I saw that movie, I realized I can get my friends together and play together and start a band, and make songs. I was in Grade 5, and there was a guitar player in Grade 6, so I schemed this idea that we were gonna perform the song, "That Thing You Do!" at a talent show. I'd seen this guy play guitar once, and I was like, "he could handle it." He came over, and he clearly couldn't handle it. So that didn't happen, but it planted the seed for all of this.
Avery’s Formative Interest: Bugs and Creepy Crawlers
I was a very delicate and easily frightened child, so I do not relate to this pick at all, but tell me about bugs and creepy crawlers.
Avery Kissick: Most other kids were also terrified of that kind of stuff. I don't know why, but from a very young age, I was very drawn to bugs, snakes, spiders, and anything like that. I was especially obsessed with scorpions as a kid and but they didn't live where I grew up, so it was always this thing that was out of reach. I still am into it all today. I really like nature.
How deep did it go? Every kid in the ‘90s seemed to have one of those Ant Farm toys where you could watch ants burrow in a box.
Avery: I would catch whatever I could find. I think people thought I would become an entomologist or something, but that didn't happen.
Andy: Avery, you had scorpions, right? When did you get those?
Avery: My dad got me a scorpion from the pet store when I was 12. It was amazing. Actually, when I was really young, my great aunt lived in the Bahamas, and my grandma would go there for the winters. My uncle would collect tarantulas and scorpions around his property and would put them in jars of rubbing alcohol. This was pre-9/11, so my grandma would bring me jars of tarantulas and scorpions back on the flight home, and it was the coolest thing ever for me. I was a weird child.
Andy’s Formative Album: Elliott Smith, Elliott Smith
Talk to me about how this album influenced you.
Andy: This was a turning point for me. We'll go back to That Thing You Do! as step one. I was a drummer, but I learned how to play guitar from the guitarist in my first band, and then I started writing songs a little bit. Everything that I was into was very in the alternative world: Blink-182 and pop punk were big for me, then emo and Dashboard Confessional. I loved acoustic music and the idea of singer-songwriter-y stuff, but it was always this alternative thing where someone's yell-singing and crying at the same time. Around that time, there was a message board at my school. The older band guys in Grade 12 would say, "If you like Dashboard, you should listen to the real stuff like Elliott Smith." So I listened to it and went to the CD store and bought the self-titled record, and it blew my mind. That record is really stripped back, but it's so complicated. Just hearing what you could do with so little instrumentation and make it sound so big and expansive. I truly started to get into writing after that record, because I had a much higher bar to aim for.
Avery’s Formative Band and Activity: Blink-182/Learning Drums
Andy mentioned Blink-182 and being into pop-punk before he heard Elliott Smith, so this is a great segue into your choice.
Avery: With Blink-182, my oldest sister had Dude Ranch and stuff, and I was definitely into that band after she let me borrow it. Then, when Enema of the State came out, it really spoke to me as a 12-year-old boy. Around that time, I got my first set of drums. I'd taken some piano lessons and stuff growing up, but once I got a drum set, it immediately became my thing. I just loved it. I grew up on a farm, which was boring, but I could spend so much time playing drums. Travis Barker really blew my mind. He was so fast and complicated, and I wanted to learn what he was doing.
Sure, they were musically formative, but they really influenced a generation of 12-year-olds’ sense of humor.
Avery: That was the other thing! Being a bit of a church kid and stuff, the irreverent humor was so important. They were so over the top and hilarious.
The other part of your answer is about learning drums. You mentioned growing up on a farm: were your drums in the house or out in a barn?
Avery: Both! When they were in the house, it was crazy. The way I was drumming, my family would put up with so much. I would drum all the time and so loud too but nobody really gave me shit for it at all. The shed was where all of my friends would jam, though.
Andy’s Formative Movie: I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002)
This is step three for you, Andy. As someone calling from Chicago, I’m glad you picked it.
Andy: This is definitely step three. So, I was in this pop punk band, and we all lived together. The guitar player was the indie guy. I was the Elliott Smith guy. That was all I was into, really. He was into Wilco. He had tried getting me into them and showed me some records like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I didn't get it. I didn't understand why there was noise all over the place. On his birthday, I got him this Wilco documentary. I randomly saw it in HMV and picked it up. Then we watched it, and it instantly made me a Wilco fan. But it also blew my mind, because on my own, I couldn't connect that the songs on their records are just folk songs. They were all originally just Jeff Tweedy writing with a guitar. Then, to see them in the movie in their studio space, deconstructing their own songs, bringing them back to Jeff's core version, and then fleshing them out with noise and stuff. It was this huge "aha" moment for me that any song can become anything. It made me appreciate what you could do with a simple song. In school, I loved math, and I loved problem-solving. Just seeing that element of it where you have a song, and you keep throwing it against the wall, and, eventually, you're gonna solve it. The movie itself is also really great.
Avery’s Formative Activity: Recording Music with Friends
There’s a real linear arc to your picks. From bugs to learning drums to recording with your buds.
Avery: Those are happening at the same time. Right when I got a set of drums, I met a guy who played guitar who had already been playing for a while and was pretty good. We started jamming. His dad had recording gear in his living room—just like an ADAT tape machine. We were writing punk and metal songs, and then his dad would record us. To be in the process of learning drums, writing songs, putting those songs to tape, and then hearing them back was so cool. After we'd make a five-song demo, we would try to improve and write five better new songs to record them again. We were teenagers—maybe 14 or 15— so it was really exciting to be able to track stuff and record your progress as well. It was such an interesting process. I love it. I somehow feel like I didn't learn that much when it comes to my own home recording. But I'm sure it taught me something.
What was your first band called?
Andy: It was Silence Through Injustice. I was waiting for you to ask that.
Avery: Yeah, that was it.
Sick. I love that.
Avery’s Recent Activity: Gardening
Growing up on a farm, did your interest in this start early?
Avery: We always had a garden, and my grandma had a garden at her place. It's always been kind of something I'm familiar with, but when my partner and I got our own house in 2016, there was a garden plot in the backyard. Since then, we got really into it, planting all the staples. We recently moved to a new place, so my plan is to build a big garden plot in the back for veggies, like tomatoes and carrots. Herbs too. You can't beat them out of the garden. After that, I got really into horticulture, especially carnivorous plants. I have a big plant collection in my basement with Venus flytraps. Our bandmate Dallas gave me one a long time ago, and it sparked something inside me. I found taking care of them and learning about them so interesting.
It also requires so much planning and discipline. I imagine having something to do that involves keeping a thing alive is very rewarding.
Avery: Totally. It's actually so challenging. These plants come from tropical climates, way up in the mountains, and they're not very easy to grow. In Saskatchewan, the climate is so extreme. It's so hot in the summer and so cold in the winter. So, having this tropical, humid little environment is nice. I have humidifiers, terrariums, and all these over-the-top things to keep them alive. I like it.
Andy’s Recent Gadget: Samplers
When I first heard the new record, I was so delighted to hear all of the samples throughout. When did using a sampler start for you?
Andy: Well, 2020 came, and the pandemic was big for me for a few reasons. It was a really intense lockdown in Toronto and I was coming off touring The Neon Skyline. That was where it was interrupted. We canceled our Europe tour, and then went straight into lockdown. We were touring on a bus, and I was drinking like a madman, because you don't have to stop drinking when the bus starts rolling. I rolled into the pandemic with such bad momentum with drinking that when May came around, I had to stop. I had this insane hangover. I was alone. I had to give it a break. After a couple of weeks, my brain started to come back in a really weird way. I felt totally clear, and I listened to the stuff that I was making, and realized this is some goofy shit. It was a very blunt realization that I was floundering, and I needed to figure out a new way to do this. And so I ordered a sampler. I can't really remember why. It was maybe a YouTube rabbit hole or something, but I've always loved chopped up sounds like Wu Tang Clan, Liquid Swords, and glitchy sample-heavy stuff.
With the way that I make music, I felt totally stuck in doing the same things over and over. Like, I'm trying to be the Beatles or something. I kept buying vintage gear, but I live in the present, where we're essentially in the future with music technology, but I'm somehow this purist who can't touch any of the cool new gadgets. So, I ordered a sampler, and I realized I can keep writing the same music in a totally new way.
Avery: “Dance” was the first song using the sampler you sent us.
Andy: I started writing songs by chopping up piano, and one was "Don't Let It Get to You" on my record Norm. I eventually had to replace the chopped-up piano with real piano because I reserved the sampler stuff for Foxwarren. They called dibs on that.
Avery’s Recent Activity: Cooking
Was this a pandemic hobby as well?
Avery: No, I've always been into it. My mom taught me to cook a bit when I was younger, and I've always enjoyed cooking. More and more lately, I really enjoy it. Growing your own veggies plays into it too. I wouldn’t say I have proper culinary skills or anything, but as long as it tastes good, who cares?
I agree. What’s a recent recipe that truly hit?
Avery: I like a good Thai curry. I made a good green curry the other day. I try to be well-rounded. We made pizza last night. We got some good pepperoni and some good mozzarella with black olives, red peppers, and mushrooms on it. It was pretty loaded, but these are not complicated things.
Andy’s Recent Idea: Microtonality
This is a fun one. We could go in a lot of directions here.
Andy: All my picks are kind of successive: from Tom Hanks to Elliott Smith to Wilco. The sampler really lent itself well to experimentation. Recently, I had my mind blown by a band I can't remember. It was a pretty normal song, but once it hits its chorus, there's a microtonal shift. It blew my mind. Because I was experimenting with the sampler, I realized that with piano, you're pretty fixed. On a guitar, you can bend notes, but you're never going to be truly in between. With the sampler, you can put anything onto the pads and shift the pitch, even just a half-note. That's where I am experimenting currently with music. With the sampler specifically, I was kind of only using the halfway point between notes as this shift, or vibe shift, while writing.
Would you ever go the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard route, where it’s all microtonal instruments?
Andy: Well, yeah. With the record I've been working on, I'm experimenting with a halfway shift, so technically 24 divisions of the octave. But lately, I've been dabbling in a YouTube wormhole with a 31 equally divided octave. So that just means, instead of 12 notes, there are 31 per octave. The thing that I am coming to understand about this is that there are still the same things as there are in 12-tone—a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, a seventh. It's the same intervals, except there are different degrees. So, yeah, that is what I want to do. There are these things called isomorphic keyboards that have all these buttons, and you can lay out any sort of microtonal tuning onto these keys, and you can find all these crazy chords. You can look up a YouTube video and it's this artist, who works in a lot of microtonal tunings, but the feeling that you get from some of these chords is so alien. I don't even know how to describe it. It's otherworldly.
Avery’s Recent Activity: Camping
Your answers all feed into each other: This is a man who likes the earth.
Avery: Living in a city now after growing up in the country, I like getting out there. Hiking, sleeping in a tent, and having a fire. You can get as rugged as you want. There's something very basic about it that I find so calming. I grew up near the valley, so hiking through it was a way to stay grounded. Still, being outside keeps me grounded.
Do you have a go-to spot?
Avery: Canada is so vast that even in the prairies, there are so many good spots to go. It depends on what you're after. There's a place called Grasslands Provincial Park that's really interesting. But if you go down there, you can’t even go get ice cream from somewhere, it's that isolated. Dark Sky Preserve is great too. It's crazy at night. The stars are out of control. You can see so many satellites—I didn't know that many were up there. It feels like the whole sky is moving.
Andy’s Recent Activity: Writing Stuff Down
Do you mean this in a creative process way or a remembering to do things in your daily life way?
Andy: Lately, maybe my short-term memory is getting a little bad. But for the past couple of years, I've been journaling a lot, which can be helpful, but can also just be me ruminating and making myself feel worse and worse as I write. I've been applying it to almost everything. For working and for writing itself, I will journal very conversationally about ideas and stuff. I think it's the most useful thing that I've found for expanding my capacity. You know when you have that daunting thought where you read a novel and you wonder how this person has this all in their head? They did but they wrote it down and refined it over a long process. It was a breakthrough for me in understanding how people managed to make expansive works like that. It's important: you write something down, however stupid or small the idea is. If you didn't write it down, that idea might not stick around. But if you write it down and start talking about it, you can expand on it. You can find the next step. Lately, a lot of my records start out with sticky notes for each song, moving them around, and having my eyes on the whole project. That way, I can think and see at the same time. It's kind of morphed into this thing I call "work journaling." I have a work journal where I talk to myself about whatever I want to work on.
I recently had an artist on this series who chose “journaling” as one of their picks, and they said how formative it was in their creative process.
Andy: I used to hate drawing because I would be so ashamed of whatever came out on the page. I didn't want anyone to ever see this. It was so embarrassing. But to get good at drawing, I had to just draw and not be ashamed. It's the same with writing. If you're not writing stuff down all the time, maybe you're not reinforcing bad habits, but you're also never correcting your bad habits.
What I listened to:
The No Expectations 110 Playlist: Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal
1. Foxwarren, "Deadhead"
2. The Crime Family, "Sex Tourism"
3. Friendship, "Betty Ford"
4. Forth Wanderers, "7 Months"
5. Margaux, "Velouria"
6. Hot Joy, "Quality Control"
7. Florry, "Say Your Prayers Rock"
8. Daphne's Demise, "Golden Light"
9. Resavoir & Matt Gold, "Hazel Canyon"
10. Madeline Kenney, "Scoop"
11. Saint Etienne, "Glad:
12. Grumpy, Claire Rousay, Pink Must, "Harmony"
13. Moontype, "Anymore"
14. Far Caspian, "An Outstretched Hand / Rain From Here to Kerry"
15. Whitney, "Darling"
Florry, Sounds Like…
I like bands that feel like bands. Where the unit is greater than the sum of its parts. Where every member feels distinct from each other, yet contributes some palpable and ineffable both on record and onstage. There’s no star, but there’s no uniformity. Seeing a group that’s just four guys in suits stopped being interesting after the Beatles did it. Watching Florry perform last year at Hideout crystallized this observation: each musician has an exuberant and unmistakable personality, but it somehow all coheres into something electric in any given show. The Burlington and Philadelphia-based band captures this lightning in a bottle on their sophomore effort, Sounds Like…, which is one of the finest collections of rambunctious, barroom twang 2025 has to offer. It opens with a torpedo-like intensity with “First it was a movie, then it was a book.” It teems with guitarmonies, kinetic energy, and frontwoman Francie Medosch yelping, “Well, last night I watched a movie / movie made me sad / ‘cause I saw myself in everyone / how'd they make a movie like that?” While Florry thrive on raucousness, Sounds Like… is chock-full of understated moments of beauty and bliss too. “Sexy” is woozy while “Big Something” is plucky and plaintive. While I know Medosch is a fan of Bob Dylan, you can really hear the Rolling Thunder Revue spark exude throughout this full-length.
Moontype, I Let The Wind Push Down On Me
Back in late 2020, I was sent an early download of a record by a Chicago band called Moontype. Pre-pandemic, I didn’t know much about them except for the fact that I had a few mutual friends with their members, but upon listening to their debut album, Bodies of Water, it was clear this was the LP I needed to hear that year. Bandleader Margaret McCarthy’s voice is ethereal and pointed, her melodies so unorthodox it’s beguiling, and the arrangements were livewire, fascinating, and cathartic. I was working for VICE at the time and wrote a long Noisey Next profile on the band when the record came out in spring 2021. It’s funny that then, I wrote that chemistry was the thing that bound this band together, but in 2025, the group has a brand new lineup and is even more locked in. Adding on guitarists Joe Suihkonen (The Deals, Patter) and Andrew Clinkman (Spirits Having Fun, Krill 2)—both absolute shredders in the local music scene—has allowed McCarthy to find new textures for her vivid, heterodox writing. Where all of her songs are written on bass with her voice serving as a counter, the melodies here especially pop on “Long Country” and the hazy “Anymore.” It’s a record where any track could be a single, and I’m so happy I get to live in a city where bands like this can sprout organically. I can already tell their record release show Sunday will be one of my most-cherished memories of the year: shoutout Krill 2 and Fran for making it another perfect night at the Empty Bottle.
What I watched:
Friendship (in theaters)
I’m going to preface this by saying that as someone born in Michigan, I love Tim Robinson. I Think You Should Leave is very funny, and Detroiters is undeniably one of the best sitcoms of this century so far. He’s consistently hilarious in anything he stars in. He’s also great in Friendship, the new A24 movie from first-time film director Andrew DeYoung that also costars Paul Rudd. Billed as “I Love You Man for sickos,” the film is more a slightly darker and 90-minute ITYSL sketch. To be clear, there are some incredible bits, and I laughed quite a bit, but they’re mostly throwaway gags. The characters are flimsy, and any attempt to build some pathos or emotional stakes feels starkly expositional. Maybe I was thrown off and put in a bad mood by the people behind me giggling incessantly at everything onscreen, but I think I wanted something with a little more heart, a little more intention, and a little more plot. Worth seeing if you like Robinson, I guess.
What I read:
Perfection (by Vincenzo Latronico)
Berlin, a city I’ve never been to, has featured heavily in my personal reading in 2025. So far this year, I’ve devoured the American but Berlin-based writer Lauren Oyler’s essay collection No Judgment, Emily Witt’s rave and drug memoir Health & Safety, which takes a detour into the city’s famous nightclub Berghain, and I’ve finally dipped my toes into Thomas Bernhard’s oeuvre. (As you can imagine, Berlin has also come up quite a bit when I’m reading political history.) Italian novelist Vincenzo Latronico sets his brief and biting Perfection in Berlin, but he casts an ex-pat “digital nomad” couple who moved there as the protagonists. They have laptop jobs, they barely know the language (and don’t need to since most folks there speak English), they can pay for vacations by putting their property on Airbnb (they also, later on, complain about their neighborhood’s rising housing costs), they like mid-century furniture, and a certain brand of oatmilk that they can get at every neighborhood coffee shops. Despite every aspect of their lives being meticulously curated, they’re still unsatisfied. It’s scathing, perceptive, and at under pages, you can breeze through it in a single sitting.
The Weekly Chicago Show Calendar:
The gig calendar lives on the WTTW News website now. You can also subscribe to the newsletter I produce there called Daily Chicagoan to get it in your inbox a day early.
Have loved Andy’s work for a long time now. This was a great interview, thanks for sharing.