By Will Yannacoulias
“Neighbourhood Bones”, released last Friday on streaming and on video Monday, is the debut single from Saskatoon based heavy alt-rock group il Creatura. The band’s debut has generated a buzz, as il Creatura is a direction change for the group formerly known as The Pistolwhips, who spent the better part of the last decade playing almost every venue and festival in Canada for a passionate fan base.
Tyson Schultz and Brad Heck had already been playing with Pistolwhips founder Rylan Schultz when former Sheepdog’s guitarist Leot Hanson joined the group in 2018. “It’s a transition from that band into this band” Rylan Schultz told NSMZ. “If you saw the Pistolwhips in the band’s last two or three years, it’s the same dudes. We took a break when Covid first hit and when we got back at it, it was an easy decision to say ’this new stuff sounds different, let’s make a fresh start and make a new band’”
The ‘new stuff’ is over thirty songs written and arranged after Hanson came in, including a forthcoming second single and an album to be released in the next month. “It’s strange to think about” Leot Hanson explained, “but if we’d started to release the new music when we originally intended to, in August 2019, it might have actually been another Pistolwhips album. We’d been throwing around the idea at the time of changing the name but hadn’t done it yet.”
There’s been a lot of excitement surrounding il Creatura’s debut from fans of both The Pistolwhips and The Sheepdogs. Despite their own eagerness to have their new material heard the band held off for as long as possible, hoping to tour to support the record. “We decided to hold off until we knew we could really execute what we can do.” Schultz shared. “The album is awesome and we’re all super proud of it but I think it’s almost incomplete without a loud sweaty rock show. We really wanted the timing of the release to be right so we could support it with a tour. It’s been so hard to predict though and we finally decided to just get it out there.”
The video for ‘Neighbourhood Bones’ was shot by Jason Hattie, the visionary behind Lawrence House Films and former Pistolwhips drummer. “We shot a bunch of stuff in Rylan’s studio, then went to our good friend Hattie’s place” Hanson recalled. “He had a fire pit and crazy lights, and we got weird with it… we ended up in a graveyard at one point.” Schultz added that “we didn’t want to do anything too linear, wanted to leave things to people’s imagination a bit. It came naturally, a really DIY Lo-Fi 90’s vibe, dark and creepy”
Watch in the next month as il Creatura release their second video single and their self titled debut album on all streaming services. See the band appear for the first time as il Creatura at the Brandt Center in Regina February 4th as part of the Frost Festival.