Keegan Powell Announces BETWEEN THE HALLS Mini LP

Toronto power-pop artist Keegan Powell has announced his new album Between The Halls, set to arrive on October 16. Powell has also shared the record's third single, 'Urge To Learn.'

Discussing the single, Powell notes, 'When I was younger and living at home in the suburbs, I'd get in my sty pontiac montana in the middle of the night and drive off not knowing where I was going, just to feel something, like I was going somewhere for a moment. I'd always end up at a gas station, freeway parking lot, sleep there for a while, wake up, think 'this is completely ridiculous, I can't live like this'. The soundtracks on those drives mainly consisted of 'Loveless', 'Take It From The Man!', 'Nothing's Shocking' and I guess when I was writing 'Urge To Learn' and this album, I wanted to add to that soundtrack, that image, that certainty of knowing I was lost.'

Between The Halls is an unusually high voltage burst of ethereal octane rock and sugary sweet pop melodies. Although at times it seems the album is sourcing dark energy simply as a way of flexing nature, that duality, where intimacy and unease relate seamlessly, is not only Powell's lyrical trademark but his overall sonic and potential life thesis. Surrounded by abstract insights and a mood that never seems to resolve between brooding and transcendent, each song reveals another secret with its narrative refusing completion, instead pushing towards the unscratchable question that is ultimate mystery.

Powell started his journey writing and recording in Toronto rock band Teenage Kicks (Resolution/EMI) as guitarist on their debut album Spoils of Youth (2014), recorded with Alain Johannes (Queens of the Stone Age, Them Crooked Vultures). Powell went on to compose songs for Chastity (Dine Alone/Captured Tracks) on their debut LP Death Lust (2018), Home Made Satan (2019), and Suffer Summer (2022). In 2020, Powell joined studio project Darling Congress alongside Peter Van Helvoort and Brett Emmons of The Glorious Sons as lead guitarist.

Released in 2022, his debut album Previous Pain garnered 5 singles across college and satellite radio. The album, co-produced by Dylan Frankland of the band Tallies (Bella Union Records), featured drummer Phil Jones, who played most famously on Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever. In 2023, Powell released Fear Be Gone, which came from the marriage of two unlikely, yet related places which inspired Powell to approach songwriting from a new perspective. The marrying of the literary and the lyrical derived from a book he started writing called Scatterings; part allegorical, one part poetry, one part short stories. As the poetic parts of the book started to form, Keegan realized the poems could potentially build some of the narrative for an album he was writing serendipitously.

The soothing acoustic howls that made Fear Be Gone a college radio staple across North America proved something very clear… Powell has never stayed in one spot artistically. Not because he doesn't want to, but because he is incapable of it.

Powell will support Between The Halls with a short run of Canadian dates this fall, with more in the works for 2027.

Tour Dates

10/18 - St. Catherines, ON @ Warehouse Concert Hall

10/22 - Winnipeg, MB @ Public Domain

10/24 - Thunder Bay, ON @ Bloom

11/22 - Guelph, ON @ Sonic Hall

11/29 - Hamilton, ON @ Mills Hardware

Between The Halls Track List

01. Too Hard

02. Long Way Through Doom

03. Drown

04. Born Immortal

05. Urge To Learn

06. Miracle

07. Taunted

08. Miss A

09. Connexion

Photo Credit: Stella Gigliotti