Shiv and the Carvers are choosing action over perfection

For Shiv and the Carvers, that contradiction is the heart of Always Watching, the Toronto punk band’s debut full-length album: a record about surveillance, institutional violence, and the strange intimacy of having the world’s horrors delivered directly to your devices.

“I’m looking at my phone constantly and I’m seeing the worst things possible unfold in front of me,” says vocalist Shiv Scott, describing how the past three years of watching events in Gaza shaped the record. Social media gives people access to realities that traditional media ignore or downplay, she explains, but with an uncomfortable catch: “I am aware that I’m also being watched.” That tension runs from the opener, “Daddy’s Always Watching”, to other songs that question the systems around us and address religion, oppression, police brutality, and more.

Musically, Always Watching is as direct as its subject matter. 11 songs fly by in just over 38 minutes, built on big, heavy riffs and hooks that stay in your head, with a hard-rock swagger that nods to the 1970s. The abrasive drive puts the band in the same angry, high-energy territory as Amyl and the Sniffers, with a streak of Bikini Kill in the fury, too. It is rough around the edges but recorded with enough clarity that every riff hits, leaving room for Scott’s voice to cut through with authority and feeling.

For Scott, songwriting is a way of putting intrusive thoughts somewhere outside herself. “It’s helpful to get it out and put it down,” she says; once a song is written, she can perform its anger or sadness without reliving the thought that inspired it. For lead guitarist Nikki Maxwell, it is different: songs that address meaningful histories matter too much to become just another part of the set. “I don’t want to lose that feeling,” she says, and so then starts the work of knowing when to put a song back on the shelf for later and when to reconjure those feelings.

Always Watching follows two EPs – Physical Capital (2023) and Tell Me You Love Me Again (2025) – and is the band’s most collaborative release yet, with riffs from everyone, including bassist Annie Jane Marie, who also plays in Dilly Dally, and drummer Mike Wiznuk. Scott and Maxwell wrote the lyrics together, cutting lines that failed to make their point. “We are a DIY band; we do everything ourselves,” Scott says, and Maxwell proves it: she designed the vinyl sleeve and much of the band’s artwork herself. “She’s the coolest design person I know,” Scott adds.

The pair met in the Toronto roller derby scene, Scott skating for one home team and Maxwell coaching another. Scott credits the sport with teaching her to read other people’s movements at speed, a skill that now keeps her in sync with her bandmates on stage. She had been writing music since she was around twelve, but shelved her band ambitions for the track. When the pandemic shut that world, if not the whole world, down, she returned to writing and reached out to people about forming a band. Maxwell, meanwhile, was working from home when she picked up her sister’s old high-school guitar and started writing songs under a minute long in response to the artist Craig Gleason’s art prompt challenges. Some of those experiments became full tracks. “You get the three-minute mark, you’re like, wow, that’s a song. We did it,” she says.

That willingness to make something before feeling ready is audible on the album. On “Executionary”, Scott plays the fiddle her grandfather once played in her family’s Irish rock band (Madd Paddy), passed on to her after his death. She is not an accomplished fiddle player, and that was never a reason not to try. “I want to embrace the idea of being less perfect about things,” she says. “Action over perfection.” The philosophy has roots in high school, when a chemistry teacher who loved prog rock spotted Nikki’s Sex Pistols T-shirts and pointed out that punk doesn’t demand mastery of your craft, and anyone can do it. With generative AI now able to produce songs from prompts frighteningly quickly, the band is committed instead to the physical work of playing, experimenting, and the beautiful process of trial and error.

That DIY spirit is sustained by Toronto’s punk community, which the band describe as welcoming rather than cutthroat. “People really do want to cheer for each other,” Scott says. When Shiv and the Carvers toured England, Sarafina from Bonnie Trash shared contacts and advice; back home, the band have opened for Viagra Boys at History, Toronto’s 2,500 capacity venue, and hope to build more connections between scenes across Canada, where travelling between major cities can cost hundreds of dollars.

Always Watching cannot make the world’s bullshit disappear, or resolve the helplessness of being a witness to such suffering from a distance; what it can do, however, is offer a way to act in the face of that helplessness: turning intrusive thoughts into songs, picking up an unfamiliar instrument, designing a record sleeve, or helping another band find its way onto a stage.

 As Scott puts it, the alternative to waiting until you are good enough is actually quite simple: “Action over perfection.”