For listeners who were present during Calgary’s indie boom, the song carries an almost uncanny sense of recognition. Not because it sounds like Azeda Booth, The Cape May or Chad VanGaalen’s solo work, but because it shares the same rawness that made those projects so exciting in the first place. You can hear all three artists following their instincts rather than chasing trends, building something that feels simultaneously rooted in their history and entirely its own.

For longtime followers of Calgary’s independent music community, the collaboration feels almost inevitable.

Back in the early 2000s, Greenwood was helping shape the city’s electronic underground with Azeda Booth, a project that blended intricate production, dreamy melodies and a restless experimental spirit years before those sounds became commonplace. Around the same time, St. John’s band The Cape May stood apart from their louder contemporaries through a brand of prairie folk songwriting that felt both intimate and literary. Albums like Central City May Rise Again (2005) and Glass Mountain Roads (2006) remain among the most enduring documents of that era.

Then there was VanGaalen, whose hand-drawn worlds and singular songwriting would eventually carry him from Calgary basements to international stages. Long before the awards and acclaim, he was selling homemade CDs outside The Wicked Wedge and quietly building a body of work that would become foundational to an entire generation of Canadian independent musicians.

What makes CG Tears so compelling isn’t simply that these artists finally decided to make a record together. It’s the fact that they waited until now.

The project began more than a decade ago as an occasional collaboration between Greenwood and St. John. Songs were started, revisited, abandoned and rediscovered. Progress happened in bursts, but it wasn’t until Greenwood returned to Calgary after years in Los Angeles that the project began to gather real momentum.

When Greenwood and St. John eventually brought the recordings to VanGaalen for mixing, they thought they were nearly finished, but VanGaalen disagreed.

“We were like, ‘Hey Chad, do you want to mix this record that’s fully done?’” Greenwood recalls with a laugh. Instead, what followed was months of additional experimentation, reworking arrangements, adding instrumentation and pushing the material somewhere entirely new. What started as a finished record evolved into a true collaboration.

“I’ve known these clowns for a long time, and I knew that if they were coming with some stuff, it was pretty precious cargo,” says VanGaalen. “I knew that I wanted to see Morgan’s work see the light of day.”

That sense of creative trust runs throughout the album. Greenwood provides the foundation with intricate rhythms, shimmering synthesizers and the kind of detailed production work that made Azeda Booth such a cool project in the first place. St. John brings the emotional centre, delivering impressionistic lyrics and understated melodies that feel suspended somewhere between memory and dream. VanGaalen supplies the final layer of weirdness, adding bass, backing vocals, arrangements and sonic detours that push the music into unexpected territory.

The song’s title comes from a story St. John heard from a friend who claimed to have experienced a lucid dream involving a mysterious blue wall of electricity and a glimpse into another person’s life. Like much of the band’s music, it occupies that fascinating space between reality and imagination.

VanGaalen’s accompanying video extends that atmosphere through a series of hand-drawn animations populated by “apple men,” floating objects, and surreal transformations. Created quickly and entirely by hand, it carries the same playful, homespun charm that has made his visual work so instantly recognizable over the years.

The deeper listeners venture into the forthcoming album, the more rewards they’ll uncover. One of its standout moments, “BatsBats,” features guitar work from the late Chris Reimer of Women, a longtime friend and collaborator whose influence continues to ripple through Canadian independent music more than a decade after his passing. His appearance feels less like a guest spot than another thread connecting the record to Calgary’s creative lineage.

Ultimately, CG Tears isn’t a nostalgia project. If anything, it’s a reminder that some artists never stop evolving.

The friendships that shaped Calgary’s indie underground two decades ago are still producing new ideas, new sounds and new possibilities. Most of the cool venues from that era may have disappeared. The city may have changed. But the creative spark that connected these musicians in the first place remains very much alive.

CG Tears spent years taking shape behind the scenes, but after hearing “Blue Wall of Ectoplasm,” it feels impossible to imagine it arriving at any other moment.

Some records need time to become what they’re meant to be.