Vancouver-based vintage soul, blues and roots quartet Honeybear, the Band has just released its new album, The Cure, marking the follow-up to a debut that turned four longtime friends into one of Canada’s fastest rising roots acts. The band celebrates with two album release shows, first at Upstairs in Victoria tonight alongside Emmett Jerome, then home in Vancouver tomorrow at the Hollywood Theatre.
Honeybear formed in 2023, though the members had already spent decades crossing paths on tours across Canada and down the West Coast. The band’s origins trace back to the pandemic, when the group found itself jamming outdoors in parks, running amps and PA systems off jerry rigged motorcycle batteries just to keep playing live music together. That same instinct, chasing the sound over everything else, still defines the band, described by music blog B-Side Guys as sounding “like The Teskey Brothers collaborated with the ghost of Muddy Waters.”
The Cure expands that sound well beyond the original quartet. Across 11 tracks, Ian Beaty and Colin Brumelle’s songwriting is joined by rotating keys from Mike Kenney and Cindy Fairbank, drums from Geoff Hicks and Tim Watson, pedal steel from Scott Smith, horns from Jerry Cook, Jocelyn Waugh, Adam Kyle and Gregory Dent, and background vocals from Dawn Pemberton and Colleen Rennison. The album was recorded across two studios, with Jeff Zipp behind the board at Light Machine and John Raham recording at Afterlife Studios, before Jeff mixed the record and Doug Krebs handled mastering, the same team responsible for the warm, horn laced sound the band has built its reputation on.
The album’s early single, “Just Your Fool,” offers a preview of what’s ahead, a classic blues ballad built around devotion that may not be entirely returned. Written by Ian and Colin and produced by Jeff, the song is a riff on the Slim Harpo classic “Raining in My Heart” and has already passed 100,000 streams, proof that there is still a real appetite for horn driven, human sounding music made the old way.
That appetite has followed the band since its 2025 debut, I Was Wrong, which has surpassed nine million streams on Spotify.
The industry has taken notice as well, with Honeybear recently nominated for a Blues Music Award from the Memphis based Blues Foundation and a Blues Artist of the Year nomination from the WCMA. It also earned a spot on the Vancouver Sun’s “10 Artists to Watch in 2026” and was named Roots Music Canada’s Critics’ New Discovery of the Year.
With The Cure, Honeybear, the Band brings its road-tested chemistry and growing cast of collaborators into its most fully realized record yet and invites fans out to hear it live at both release shows.
Album Release Shows:
- Sept. 9 – Upstairs, Victoria, BC, with Emmett Jerome
- Sept. 10 – Hollywood Theatre, Vancouver, BC, album release party
