Gizmo Photo credit: Colin Medley
This summer, Charlottetown, Canada’s Gizmo announced their debut album, All Your Worships, due October 2 via Victory Pool. The four-piece — frontman Julien Kitson, bassist Spencer Swaine, guitarist Patrick Stephen, and drummer Daniel Hartinger — draw from the guitar-damaged pop of ’90s American slacker rock and the rich musical lineage of Canada’s east coast. Their songs balance clever, wry humor with a more vulnerable emotional undercurrent, finding unexpected depth in the off-kilter charm of their arrangements.
Today, Gizmo share “Walking The Floor,” the final single ahead of the album. Built on thick guitars, crashing drums, and a hint of twang, the track carries a familiar sense of nostalgia while allowing Kitson’s punk-adjacent, slacker-emo vocals to settle into something more wistful. It’s a song about longing and restlessness, filtered through the band’s distinctly skewed take on power pop.
Explains Kitson,
“This was the second last song written for All Your Worships. This song was a combination of attempting to translate life events into song as well as tipping my hat to country and western music. The song title/closing lyric of the song is a nod to/play-off of ‘Walking The Floor Over You’ by Ernest Tubb. The term ‘walking the floor’ was heavily used in country music of the 1930s and ’40s as a metaphor of heartbreak and restlessness. In my head, “Walking The Floor” is a lyrical reimagining of that through a power pop-esque lens (early demos of this song were a Big Star attempt). For a while, it was pretty difficult for me to write about real-life topics, but somehow paying homage to country and western music was my gateway to comfortability in that department.”
That sense of translation—of taking familiar musical touchpoints and finding a personal way into them—runs throughout All Your Worships. The record is informed by Gizmo’s overlapping tastes, with Guided By Voices and Pavement providing obvious reference points, while the gothic jangle of R.E.M. and the jagged Americana of Silver Jews emerge in less expected corners. Mixed by Alex Edkins and Loel Campbell, with mastering by Greg Obis at Chicago Mastering Service, the album finds cohesion in its arrangements without sacrificing the band’s willingness to move between sounds.
Crisp acoustics, warped offset riffs, melodic basslines, and Hartinger’s precise drumming form the underlying palette. Tracks such as “Antiques Roadshow,” “Celestial,” and album closer “Pantone 312” may occupy different corners of that palette, but they remain recognizably Gizmo. Across ten tracks, All Your Worships feels less like a collection of disconnected experiments than a band discovering how its disparate interests can coexist.
The album’s songs came together between 2022 and 2025, drawing lyrical inspiration from late-night television, playing tourist, abandoned establishments, and the process of translating difficult periods of life into something more tangible. Much of the writing took place in the band’s old basement rehearsal space, where each member would bring ideas to be developed collectively. In February 2025, that basement mindset moved to a hall in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where Gizmo recorded the album with Edkins and Campbell over eight days.
Says Kitson,
“Aside from our previous release, this album was very much a collective project. Each band member would bring ideas to our old basement rehearsal space, where most of the songs were fleshed out. In February 2025, we relocated that basement rehearsal space mindset to a hall in Great Village, Nova Scotia to record these songs with Alex Edkins and Loel Campbell over eight days. We would try to emulate the sounds of My Bloody Valentine, the ’80s Athens, Georgia scene, and J Mascis, then cap off the days by drinking Moosehead beer while listening to bands like Lilys, Polvo, and early Bee Gees. Somehow, all of these lyrical inspirations, basement workshops, and musical touchpoints came together and formed this debut album we call All Your Worships.”
“Walking The Floor” draws from country and western music, particularly Ernest Tubb’s “Walking The Floor Over You,” while filtering that influence through a power-pop and slacker-rock lens. What about country music made it feel like the right vehicle for exploring the more personal themes in the song?
JULIEN KITSON: For the longest time I found it pretty difficult to write about personal things, I guess I just couldn’t find the formula to writing a heartbreak song that I didn’t find tacky. Obviously Ernest Tubb, as well as many country artists of that time and onward, excelled at writing in that ballpark, so by putting those goggles on and using country terminology of that time really helped me navigate and overcome that stuff. I admire country and western music of that time deeply, so I was glad to incorporate that/pay tribute to that world of music, especially to Mr. Tubb.
All Your Worships brings together a wide range of influences, from Guided By Voices and Pavement to R.E.M., Silver Jews, My Bloody Valentine, and the ’80s Athens, Georgia scene. How did the four of you navigate those overlapping tastes and turn them into a sound that feels distinctly like Gizmo?
JULIEN KITSON: We have been influenced by those bands pretty much from the get go, and because we’ve been fans for so long I feel like there’s a natural influence in our songs from bands like Pavement or My Bloody Valentine. The pop hook sensibilities of bands like Teenage Fanclub or GBV are crucial to us, and tonally we look up to guys like Kevin Shields and J Mascis like a lot of guitarists in indie rock do. Individually we all have our own places we draw influence from. I suppose we attempt to adapt certain elements from those places and somehow try to make them our own.
You’ve described the album as a collective project, with songs developing in your basement rehearsal space before being recorded over eight days in Great Village, Nova Scotia. What was the process of making the record together like, and how did that environment shape the finished album?
JULIEN KITSON: The record was made during eight cold February days in a very rural part of Nova Scotia, in what was essentially a recreation hall converted into a studio. That being said, there was really no motion or movement surrounding us, which to me was a blessing. Luckily this recreation hall also had an upper level full of beds and rooms, so everyone involved in the making of the record stayed in this hall and rarely left. Being that far out and surrounded by mountains of snow and ice meant that the only thing to do was hunker down and get creative. We would track for about 10-12 hours a day, cook dinner and finish the days by listening back to takes, doing scratch vocals or playing Wii. Being in that environment really limited any sort of distractions and allowed us to just shape these songs and bring them to life.
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