Bio
You won’t find a more refreshing band than fuzz-rock power trio Electric Lemonade. The Yukon outfit pairs big feelings with an audacious sound, riffing on rock influences ranging from Alabama Shakes to Soundgarden. Through stories of queer desire, mental health struggle, and falling-out friendships, Electric Lemonade make music to move and feel through.
It’s not a stretch to say that the universe wanted the band to come together. It all started in 2024, when vocalist and electric guitar virtuoso Sarah Murphy (she/her) was in a folk-pop five-piece that just wasn’t feeling right. Unsure what to do next, Murphy went—on a whim—to get a tarot reading from a friend. She asked, “What do I do about my band?”, and when her friend read the cards, the message was clear: “You already have everything you need.”
It turns out this was precisely true: Murphy was already gelling flawlessly with two members of the old five-piece: bassist Hannah Mazurek (they/them) and drummer Rob Jones (he/him). With tours already booked and the pressure to keep the project going in some form, these three followed their instincts and embraced their grunge, rock, and punk passions. The sound was just right: “It just kept getting louder and louder, and edgier and edgier,” Murphy explains. At a blistering pace, the band was jamming and fleshing out song sketches until they had an album’s worth of blissfully fuzzed-out bangers. In one of these songs, “You’re Watching Me,” Murphy’s lyrics sum it all up: “I believe that mistakes lead us to places we’re bound for.”
Before they knew it, Electric Lemonade was recording their debut EP in Whitehorse’s Stackwall Sound. The band bonded with producer Jordy Walker over “weird sounds and effects, odd textures, and lots of fuzz.” The space was “bursting with creative energy,” and before long the band had written two new songs for the EP right on the floor of the studio.
Listening to Electric Lemonade’s debut EP, cheekily titled All These Songs Are About You, you’d be forgiven for thinking this band has been playing together for decades. The drums and bass bounce off one another playfully and intentionally, while Murphy and Mazurek’s combined vocals are cuttingly fierce. The EP’s opening track, “Sinners,” is the first song the band wrote together, and it defines their ability to pair daring sounds, deft lyrics, and unexpected twists. This overtly queer love song “captures what it was like growing up in a small town before being openly queer was more common and accepted.” The song harkens back to when Murphy used her masterful guitar playing as a protective force as a young queer person; as she puts it, “the very people who would bully other known queer people would talk to me about music.” The song pairs this story of star-crossed yearning with the grounded confidence that everything is—lest we forget—all made up: we can “turn sinners into saints / if we recreate reality.”
The barrelling energy of Electric Lemonade’s live show is captured on the heartbreaking track “Interstellar Scars,” with Queens of the Stone Age-level riffs erupting into Murphy’s killer vocals: “I love you so much I want to scream.” You can imagine the crowd was losing it when Electric Lemonade closed out Dawson City Music Festival this past summer, jamming on stage with guests as eclectic as Montreal’s Yoo Doo Right, members of the Queer Songbook orchestra, Devours, Miesha and the Spanks and a huge group of local Yukon legends.
Indeed, Electric Lemonade embodies the fearless spirit of their hometown of Whitehorse, where cross-genre collaborations and sonic experiments run rampant. The band shakes up your world and leaves you pleasantly disoriented, wind-swept, and energized. Listening to Electric Lemonade is like an invitation to be whoever you want to be, and as they sing it, “Who says we can’t / when it’s all just make believe?”