New Brunswick-based trio Motherhood on their most recent release

New Brunswick based conceptual art-rock trio, Motherhood, came out west for Winterruption 2026. Ahead of their set, Brydon Crain, Adam Sipkema, and Penelope Stevens chatted with The Gateway about their 2025 concept album, releasing three records in one year, and playing live.

In 2025, the band released their most recent record, Thunder Perfect Mind, which, Crain said, is a concept record. “It’s about someone getting sucked into a cloud and dragged back to the beginning of time. And, they’re forced to witness, but not interact with a five kilometre radius,” he explained. 

He added that many of the songs are about the different ways the character would feel about the cloud over time. “At first, they’re just confused. And then they start to see the cloud as a god, and then eventually they’re mad at the cloud because they’re stuck and the world’s long dead so it’s just them,” Crain said. 

The concept was inspired by Liu Cixin’s 2006 novel, The Three-Body Problem, and Youtube videos about Gnosticism. “That sounds very heavy but it’s not. It’s more like a comic book where it’s like big ideas, but it’s not meant to be taken too seriously,” he added. 

“For us, it’s about executing ideas consistently,” Stevens says

Stevens said moving around big topics is something the band does often. “Our music is conceptually heavy. It’s thick and it’s dense if you want to get in there and dig into all the layers. But we try and make it all fun and chill, where you can just also go to a rock show. You don’t have to be on LSD to get it,” she joked. 

On playing live, Stevens said the band keeps things tight. “There’s an air of playfulness, almost goofiness, but a lot of that stuff is written into the song for us. So for us, it’s about executing ideas consistently,” she explained. Sipkema said that as they get to know the songs, they sometimes change. “Sometimes we try to shovel a lot of ideas in [a song] in a short amount of time, and in doing that, there’s time to permutate the songs,” he said. 

Stevens said that their songs are full of changes, leaving the band with a reputation for it. “Which can be good or bad, depending on if you’re into very monotonous repetitive music or not. We’re very opposite of that. There’s a lot of twists and turns and that’s what keeps it exciting for us,” she added. 

Thunder Perfect Mind was one of three records that the trio released under a range of other projects in 2025, the band said. “There was a Motherhood record, [Stevens] put out her solo record, [Liquid Compactor under the name] Penny & the Pits, and then we did a country band that’s us and one of our friends,” Crain said. “So 2026 is going to be writing, and then 2027 is going to have three more records,” he explained.