KEN Mode

Jesse Matthewson found his way into the underground through a Nirvana biography. Reading Michael Azerrad's Come as You Are, he tracked down every band the book mentioned, and the trail led him to Black Flag, the Melvins, The Jesus Lizard, Scratch Acid and Big Black. Another book gave him the name for his own group. In Get in the Van, Henry Rollins summed up the agenda of Black Flag's My War era as Kill Everyone Now, or KEN mode. In September 1999, as Jesse was starting university, he formed KEN mode in Winnipeg with his younger brother Shane on drums and their friend Darryl Laxdal on bass. Both brothers had classical training through the Royal Conservatory of Music. People have been connecting the name to Barbie's boyfriend ever since, a nuisance Jesse has endured for the band's entire career.

Winnipeg already had a noise tradition of its own, built in the 1990s by Kittens, Meatrack and Stagmummer, and the brothers' first ambition went no further than sharing a bill with those bands. The nearest cities were eight hours away by road, so they played community centres, basements and bars. They recorded most of their debut at Winnipeg's Studio 11 in August 2001, when Jesse was 19 and Shane was 17, spending all the money they had on sessions that were passed down to engineers with no feel for heavy music. Jesse has never liked the sound of Mongrel, though he still stands by some of its riffs. Escape Artist Records, run by Gordon Conrad and Adam Peterson, released it on April 22, 2003, in a sleeve by Aaron Turner of Isis. It carried the trio across Canada and the eastern United States, and onto bills with Pelican, Mastodon, The End and Burnt by the Sun.

Laxdal left in late 2004, returned the following year to make Reprisal, then left for good. With only two days booked for bass and drums, the band worked with Craig Boychuk, an Albini devotee who finally knew how to record them. The album appeared in July 2006 and the bass position became KEN mode's running problem. Drew Johnston of Electro Quarterstaff filled in, and then Jahmeel Russell of Kittens, one of the very bands the brothers had once hoped to open for, joined them on the Aggressive Tendencies tour with Pelican and Daughters. They flew Russell in from Vancouver in 2007, wrote for ten days and recorded whatever came out. Jesse was often singing the songs for the first time as they were being recorded. The resulting album, Mennonite, ended with the nine-minute ‘The Goat’, on which he added keyboards, acoustic guitar and a cello he did not know how to play. Escape Artist was fading by then, so Jesse started Arctodus Records to release the album himself in 2008. He later called that a mistake, and plenty of people assumed the band had split up.

The brothers had spent these years building careers in accounting. Jesse had a business degree and nearly four years on the job, while Shane was finishing his chartered accountancy at 26 with little appetite for what came next. With new bassist Chad Tremblay they completed a first European tour with Taint, and Jesse proposed giving the band a full-time try. In August 2010 they went to Salem, Massachusetts, to record Venerable with Kurt Ballou of Converge, who noticed that Jesse had been playing slightly ahead of the beat for years. Conrad steered them to Profound Lore Records. Jesse and Shane quit their jobs in February 2011, and the album came out on March 15.

Tremblay left almost at once, and nearly every leg of the tour needed another bassist, including Russell again and Thérèse Lanz of Calgary's Mares of Thrace. Jesse turned down press to spend his time teaching the set to each newcomer. “Our backs were to the wall,” he said. They still reached Hellfest in France that June, sharing the festival with the Melvins and Ozzy Osbourne, and Andrew LaCour of Florida's Khann took over on bass that summer. On March 31, 2012, at a non-televised gala in Ottawa, Venerable won the first Juno Award for Metal/Hard Music Album of the Year, beating Anvil and Devin Townsend. Jesse was stunned. The brothers also understood exactly what the trophy was worth, and Jesse used it to apply for Canadian recording and touring grants.

That money bought time. For Entrench, KEN mode spent nearly four weeks with producer Matt Bayles, trying out piano and strings, while LaCour became the band's first co-writer of riffs since Laxdal. Gordon Conrad, now running North American operations for Season of Mist, brought them to that label, with New Damage handling Canada. The album appeared in March 2013, made the Polaris Music Prize long list and earned a Juno nomination. By Jesse's count the band played around 225 shows in a single year.

Saskatoon bassist Skot Hamilton of Adolyne replaced LaCour, and the trio turned back to the noise rock the brothers had loved as teenagers. In November 2014 Steve Albini came to Winnipeg to record them live to analogue tape, staying with the Matthewsons' parents and asking for little more than “a door to close and a bed.” The band ran on poutine and doughnuts. Eugene S. Robinson of Oxbow sent back several vocal tracks for ‘Blessed’, which Jesse arranged into an unnerving spoken performance that still plays from a sampler at their shows. Jesse called the album his dream record and titled it Success because he expected it might flop. Released in June 2015, it drew the first harsh press of their career, including a poor Pitchfork review, along with another Juno nomination. As he later put it, they had “shot ourselves in the foot.”

Burnout arrived in 2016, and the brothers came off the road. They turned their training into MKM Management Services, handling bookkeeping, business plans and grant applications for Canadian metal, punk and hardcore musicians. The company set the band's calendar from then on, with year-end accounts in January, funding deadlines in February and tax season through spring, leaving March as the safest time to tour. The Nerve EP cleared out Albini outtakes and old demos.

Their next album began with a sticker. Winnipeg artist Randy Ortiz, a friend who had drawn the Success artwork, made a 2016 charcoal piece called Happy Person Having a Pleasant Conversation in Public, based on a figure from his episodes of sleep paralysis. Jesse stuck it to his dresser, and for a year its face looked back at him every morning as the band tried to make music nasty enough to match it. Loved was recorded in January 2018 at Private Ear Recording in Winnipeg with Andrew Schneider and released on August 31 through Season of Mist, again with New Damage in Canada. It sounded ugly and darkly funny, and it brought a new voice into the band on a few tracks: the saxophone of Kathryn Kerr, a multi-instrumentalist who also did the books for MKM. The closer, ‘No Gentle Art’, replaced Venerable's ‘Never Was’ as the band's set finale, and Loved earned a fourth Juno nomination.

Jesse had bought a Moog Matriarch synthesizer in late 2019, just before the pandemic shut everything down. With Hamilton an eight-hour drive away and interprovincial travel restricted, he taught himself to use recording software and began writing songs alone, riff by riff, programming drum parts that he then taught to Shane. Sessions with Schneider were planned for July 2021, but Canada's border was still closed to non-essential workers and the American producer could not come. The delay to October gave the band six more months to write, and by the time he arrived they had 75 minutes of music. They split it in two on a title Hamilton suggested, and brought Kerr in as a full member to play saxophone, synth and piano on stage.

NULL came out on Artoffact Records on September 23, 2022, the sound of a band trying not to fall apart, and put KEN mode on the cover of Decibel, a magazine Jesse had read since its first issue. VOID followed on September 22, 2023. Born from Manitoba's long third lockdown and the return of full-band rehearsals, it was slower and more mournful, closing with ‘Not Today, Old Friend’, for which Hamilton wrote the lyrics. It reached the Polaris long list and brought a fifth Juno nomination. In 2023 the band returned to Roadburn in the Netherlands on a stage about ten times the size of the one they had played in 2015. Asked how a band goes from album titles like Success and Loved to NULL and VOID, Jesse replied, “We're not even laughing at the joke anymore.”

KEN mode marked 25 years with a 2024 tour alongside Chicago's Hide. In December 2025 the band reported that work was underway on a new record. They are also scheduled to play a secret set at Toronto's Prepare the Ground festival, which runs June 4 to 6, 2027.

-Robert Williston