As Fiver, songwriter, vocalist, researcher, and guitarist Simone Schmidt continues to innovate in the Country and Folk music traditions with humour and gravity. Last heard as featured guest on the Destroyer single “Bologna”, here Fiver is joined by the Fiver Trois, balancing tight songs with sprawling improvisational passages, arranged with dynamic energy and palpable affection.
“In 2020 I consulted with a psychic who gave me a ritual for purging my apartment of stuck energy. I’d become backed up, moving from one place to the next, inheriting my dead friends’ keepsakes, curb shopping, accumulating far too many cursed things from other people’s pasts. I was told to put everything that previously belonged to someone else in one room, to trace a chalk circle around it all, and say the spell. I piled the contents of my life high to the ceiling, I drew the circle, and I spoke the spell. Then I put back what I wanted to keep. Whatever I didn’t want I was free to let go.
Writing this record was a similar process, albeit 5 years later, and this time the house was my head. Suddenly in 2025, I began the process of Cleaning House, and found the many moods of the past 14 years had littered my mind with some nagging melodies and unfinished phrases, some molten feelings that had hardened and deserved to be enshrined, and some wilting tunes that awaited reinvigoration by new players. Along with the return of metaphor and songwriting came my ongoing delusion that I am innovating on the progressive edge of Country Music….”
Schmidt’s been called “a Canadian PJ Harvey” by the Canadian Rolling Stone (Exclaim!). Their recordings are critically acclaimed for their warmth and rigour, and have garnered four Polaris Music Prize nominations. Their collaborators range a wide musical spectrum, from Old Time musicians Lonesome Ace String Band, to free music improvisers, to punks Fucked Up, and electronic music producer ADO (Splitter). Their songs are have been widely covered most notably by U.S. Girls and Stripmall Ballads.
Fiver – Fiver Trois presents Cleaning House
(YC-073)
Glutton For Time
R.J.D.
Tomka Tom
Only In The Longing
Good Run
That’s A Joke
Crossing The Mote
Elemental Progression
July 10, 2026