WHO ARE THEY? Button-cute guitar/drums/vox duo comprising Matt MacDonald and Stephanie d’Entremont, who met during a game of Frisbee on the Halifax Commons. “Steph mentioned that she wanted to learn how to play drums, and none of her friends would teach her because they were in bands that were kinda busy, doing their band thing….” The budding collaboration resulted in their self-released album Pop-Up Book (crafted so that it does indeed pop up) and new EP Choose Your Destination, each embodying that distinctly East Coast brand of sweetly shiny pop.

SO… PLASKETT OR SLOAN? MacDonald actually mentions a more surprising inspiration for the pair’s surprisingly full sound: “I really like surf music … it creates its fullness but usually only with two instruments — there might be bass, but a lot of times it’s just melody on guitar and a lot of toms on the drums.” The pounding surf-rock drums on tracks like “Lullaby Punches” fit nicely with Choose Your Destination’s louder hooks, and at first blush the EP also seems like a lyrical departure from cutesy Pop-Up Book songs such as “The Only One I C++ is U++.”

WAIT. THAT LAST ONE? SERIOUSLY? Yep, and MacDonald doesn’t apologize on behalf of the (twee) genre, especially since a lot of Superfantastics songs are subtler and less sugary than they appear. “The weird thing I noticed … is that a lot of [our] songs seem happy and fun, but when you actually dive into the content of them they’re kinda sad.” Not all of them, though: the upbeat handclaps on “Vantastic (Eastern Canadian Road Trip Blues)” just punctuate a narrow escape from a spectacular doom when MacDonald was travelling with his other band Sleepless Nights. “We were just inside the border of Quebec around Riviere-du-Loups and the steering column came loose and the van actually started to weave across the highway … it was interesting, because there were tensions in the band, but when you get this close a brush with death it has a way of unifying everyone.”

BUT THEY HAVE SOME HAPPY MEMORIES, RIGHT? Slap bracelets, for one. All of the Superfantastics’ merch is handmade by d’Entremont (along with their album packaging and their videoblog entries) but it’s those ‘80s-nostalgia accessories that have captured imaginations and wrists out east. “Steph was looking on this website one time, just after we’d started as a band. It was just this website for promotional products, where you could get, like, mugs with your name on it, all that sort of stuff. And she noticed they had slap bracelets there. It seemed like everybody had forgotten about slap bracelets but this company was still making them. Stephanie went up to Dollarama and found some slap bracelets there, and then she went to a craft store and got, like, a case of vinyl….”

FORGET THE PAST. WHAT ABOUT THAT LIMITLESS, TERRIFYING FUTURE? “Hey, Steph,” MacDonald shouts to his mate, “what do we got on the horizon? We’re thinking maybe a multi-platinum record. A Grammy. And appear in the next Ellen Page movie or something.” The interview detours into a discussion of shared crushes on MacDonald’s fellow Haligonian, which he concludes by joking: “Maybe she’s up here, maybe she heard about Canadian Music Week and wants to check out some acts. She’s a movie star, she can fly wherever she wants now. I’ll put her on the guest list just in case. I’ll put her on every guest list for the rest of the tour!”  

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