Tokyo Police Club’s “The Last Tour” comes to Edmonton

Popular Canadian indie-rock band Tokyo Police Club recently announced that they are breaking up. Almost 20 years after their formation, the band says that “Tokyo Police Club: The Last Tour” will be their last hurrah. 

“Usually when we thought about it before, someone would say, ‘No, wait. Let’s make another record. Let’s do this tour.’ This time all four of us found ourselves agreeing [that it’s] actually a really exciting prospect,” Graham Wright, Tokyo Police Club’s keyboardist, explained.

Wright, Josh Hook, Dave Monks, and Greg Alsop met when they were kids in New Market, Ontario. They went to school together, and started the band in high school. Soon after the band’s formation, they started touring and putting out records. Wright attributes the band’s success to “internet hype” on MySpace, a social media website popular during the early 2000s. 

Releasing music and everything that comes with being a touring musician is a really specific way to live one’s life. Especially in the last twenty years, the music industry has seen unprecedented and frequent changes. It’s natural to entertain the notion of doing something else.

“It’s not as easy as it used to be, if it was ever easy. Things have changed a lot and it’s a weird business to age in,” Wright said.

Spending most of your early to mid-adulthood doing the same thing is bound to get old. That is true for any career. Wright noted that the bands he rose up to success with in the early days are long gone. For Wright, it isn’t merely that he began to grow weary of the repetition. It was also the sheer extent of the project’s involvement with their lives.

“It takes up so much space in your practical life, in your psyche, in your spiritual universe. Even when you’re totally not involved in it … just the fact [that] Tokyo Police Club is always there. And it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens when that gigantic space [becomes] suddenly free.”

The end of the band will allow each of them work on new projects

This “gigantic space” will allow for the individual band members to pursue other projects. For Wright, this involves starting a new podcast that comes out in October called Major Label Debut. As much as he enjoys being in Tokyo Police Club, he explained how they operate like a “hive mind” and that they rely on each other a lot. 

“We just have a lot of ideas and there’s not [enough] room in Tokyo Police Club for all of them, and … getting four people’s schedules aligned is difficult.”

Tokyo Police Club will perform at Midway Music Hall on September 18, alongside Born Ruffians. 

[It’s] our last Edmonton show ever. Big night, big feelings.”