La Sécurité are proudly poly-jamorous

Midway through an extensive UK and European tour in support of their second album, Bingo!, the band is no longer surrounded by crowds discovering the band for the first time, but returning as familiar faces.

“I feel like people have been showing up to these UK shows especially,” says vocalist Éliane Viens-Synnott. “We’ve heard from a few people every night that they saw us at festivals last year, like End of the Road, Shambala, Great Escape, and bought tickets to see us again now.”

That growing European audience has led La Sécurité to Brighton-based label Bella Union, which partnered with the band for the release of Bingo! outside North America, while Montreal underground scene-shapers Mothland remain their label home in Canada. The relationship began after Abbey and Simon Raymonde caught the band at New Colossus in New York. “By the end of the week, they invited us out for dinner,” Viens-Synnott recalls.

Going back to the early days, the project first emerged during the pandemic when Viens-Synnott and bassist Félix Bélisle started writing music together. A handful of early songs gradually expanded into something larger, pulling in guitarist Melissa Di Menna, with whom Viens-Synnott had originally worked on a project called Vanille. Later, guitarist Laurence-Anne Charest-Gagné and drummer Kenny Smith joined through the interconnected social circles that define much of Montreal’s independent music community.

“I knew Félix from L’escogriffe bar,” Charest-Gagné explains, referring to the beloved Montreal venue that appears several times throughout our conversation and where Viens-Synnott and Bélisle occasionally DJ, oftentimes spinning vinyl sets as DJ Raven and Standard Emmanuel, respectively. “Éliane was like, would you like to play guitar in this new project I’m working on?’ We went on a camping trip and started hanging out that summer quite a bit,” Charest-Gagné adds.

Smith, originally from the city of Cambridge, Ontario, moved to Montreal out of admiration for bands emerging from the city’s scene. The pair first connected when Smith heard Viens-Synnott spin a track by lo-fi pop pioneer R. Stevie Moore and immediately clocked their shared sensibility. Before long, she was attending rehearsals for his egg punk project, Pressure Pin.

“He asked me to drum,” Viens-Synnott laughs. “I did two or three practices, and I was like, this is way too fast. I cannot do it justice.'" Instead, she invited Smith into the emerging project that became La Sécurité, where the chemistry between the group’s members quickly became apparent. Viens-Synnott may have stepped away from the drum kit, but her percussive side remains central to the band’s sound through her synth playing and sharp tambourine work. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking the tambourine is easy, as it’s not exactly forgiving, and if you’re off beat, it’s impossible not to notice. 

The ease with which these stories unfold says a lot about the environment that produced the band, and a surprising one at that, considering how busy each member is. Each maintains projects outside La Sécurité. Charest-Gagné balances the group alongside her solo work, under the singular name Laurence-Anne. Bélisle takes centre stage in Choses Sauvages, and Smith still experiments with Pressure Pin after releasing an EP in 2024 called Polyurethane.

Speaking with La Sécurité, it also quickly becomes clear that their separate endeavours in bands aren’t viewed as competition. As members drift between projects, their audiences naturally intersect through word-of-mouth, generating excitement in their local scene. “It’s true that in Montreal it’s really collaborative,” Bélisle says. “Everyone just wants to play together and start bands together.”

Viens-Synnott understands the appeal. Although she now calls Montreal home, she grew up in Edmonton before relocating to Quebec in her twenties. After years of spending summers with family in the province, she eventually arrived with two suitcases and little else besides a desire to immerse herself in the city’s artistic community.

“I just started making friends and got DJ gigs and danced and had fun,” she says. “Everything kind of led to this.”

When Viens-Synnott jokingly describes the band as “poly-jamorous,” it feels surprisingly accurate and reflects La Sécurité’s quick wit and knack for finding punchy words that stick.

Their catalogue is full of them: “Ketchup”, “Detour”, “Snack City”, “Bingo”. Simple phrases that play with words and catch your attention, with even their band’s name carrying the same sense of urgency as a neon blinking sign. Translating, of course, to “Security” or “Safety”, it's a phrase encountered constantly in everyday life – on construction barriers, airport safety demonstrations, and public safety announcements, especially in a city perpetually under construction like Montreal. Whether intentional or not, La Sécurité has the rare quality of a great band name: once it attaches itself to the music, it’s difficult to encounter the word again without thinking of the band.

The band’s songs also move comfortably between English and French, reflecting the multilingual reality of their lives rather than any conscious attempt to reach a broader audience.

For anyone arriving in Montreal from elsewhere in Canada, that bilingual fluidity becomes an accessible point of entry. Viens-Synnott’s own path from Edmonton to Montreal mirrors the experience of many artists drawn eastward to pursue music, like Cindy Lee, Andy Mulcair of knitting, Marlaena Moore, and labelmates Truck Violence, to name a few, feeding the running joke that sooner or later, every Alberta musician ends up in Montreal. But as La Sécurité’s songs move freely between French and English, they interestingly create moments of recognition for listeners on both sides to sing along to. “We decided that we didn’t have to try to be an English band or a French band,” says Viens-Synnott. “It’s just a good representation of who we are.”

“Once people see the show, I don’t think [understanding the language] is necessarily relevant anymore,” Bélisle adds. “If I see a Japanese band, it’s awesome. I’ll get on with it.”

It’s clear that perspective also applies to Bingo!, a record that leans into instinctual simplicity. The title itself began as a working name attached to an early demo. What followed was a process familiar to anyone who has spent time indulging in La Sécurité’s music. “We like how it sounds, and then we get behind a word or a general idea because we feel there’s gonna be meat around the bone, artistically,” Bélisle says. Rather than beginning with a fully formed idea, Viens-Synnott often follows the rhythm section first, singing nonsense syllables until a melody begins to emerge. For example, “Ketchup” started with Viens-Synnott singing gibberish over the groove until the band collectively decided it sounded like someone saying “ketchup”. The title stuck.

“I figured out what the melody would be, but I didn’t have words yet,” she explains. “I’d go ‘da da da da’ over and over and then fill in the blanks later.” It’s a process that helps explain why La Sécurité’s catalogue is filled with deceptively simple phrases. Rather than leaning too far into writing autobiographical confessionals, Viens-Synnott often approaches songs as miniature scenes populated by curious characters navigating ordinary situations. “I tend to write in layers,” she says. “There’s something very mundane and silly on the top, but if you dig a bit, you’re like, actually, that’s a pretty dark song.”

Melissa Di Menna approaches the album artwork and visuals in much the same way. The cover of Bingo! started with her discovery, by chance, of a small advertisement in a late-1950s magazine featuring a motorised plush toy dog.

“It just caught my eye,” Di Menna says. “I was like, oh, this is it. I’m going to start building from this.” The dog is further assembled from bingo card cut-outs, with collage-based visuals that have become synonymous with La Sécurité. Like the music, the artwork is built from fragments of inside jokes and details that are personal to the band.

“It gives more personality to the band,” Di Menna explains. “It would be hard to bring in another artist to do our album artwork for us. I’d have to give some kind of package or something to them. It’s more concise for me to do it, so I’d like to keep doing it.”

Where their 2023 debut album, Stay Safe!, often drew on lyrics already written by Viens-Synnott, Bingo! pushed them further into improv, drawing on Viens-Synnott’s dreams, humorous studio discussions, and passing encounters, giving the album a more vivid cast.

For example, the title track began after Bélisle challenged Viens-Synnott to write about life inside an old folks’ home. Later, she dreamt about the eccentricities you might find there: “Tiny hats for all their little heads” and the matter-of-fact question, “What is your take on the new curtains?” Later, Viens-Synnott sings, “Hoping for a win, I’m three dots away / A plushy with a slushy would have made my day.” Even the song’s staccato synth motif evokes the repetitive motion of a bingo dabber racing across a card, punctuating each number call with nervous anticipation.

“Trixie” centres on a self-assured sex worker pieced together from stories Viens-Synnott heard from friends and a joke about sitting on food for OnlyFans, which led to the line “she makes six figures squashing pound cakes”. Viens-Synnott adds, “It’s still obviously very stigmatised as a way to make money or whatever. But a lot of people are doing it these days. So you know, that’s why I sing ‘she loves herself and her body enough to share and talk, it’s pretty handy.’”  

Bingo!’s most sentimental moment arrives with “Chill Pill”. The shoegaze-leaning track predates the album itself, with Viens-Synnott originally sharing the song with Di Menna years before La Sécurité existed.

“Every album needs a high-school-slow-dance-in-the-gym moment,” jokes Viens-Synnott, later adding: “When we started the band, I remember Félix mentioning that we should put ‘Chill Pill’ on Stay Safe! and I was like, actually, Melissa has a song that would be perfect and we can put ‘Chill Pill’ on the next one.” For Viens-Synnott, the track remains one of the album’s most personal moments, one they returned to, and serves as an extension of the debut album highlight “K9”.

“Deny” follows someone who finally reaches their limit in a dysfunctional relationship, with a bass hook taken from Felix’s solo work under Standard Emmanuel. On “Nah Nah”, a swirling laugh track hypnotically circles the stereo field as the elusive Viens-Synnott sings about keeping her admirers playfully at arms length. “Bingo! is a melting pot that we’re sourcing from each of our insides personally,” says Di Menna.

On “Detour”, Viens-Synnott sings: “There is a road, a short break / But the detour is more scenic / And you’ll learn a thing or two.” Four years after forming, La Sécurité have built a career by following those words of advice. Their songs rarely take the most direct route and neither have the band. From pandemic-era jam sessions in Montreal to festival stages and headlining shows across Europe, they've followed curiosity wherever it leads, collecting passionate listeners along the way. And if the crowds returning night after night are any indication, La Sécurité have got a bingo.