There are moments when life tells us it’s time to get up and get out—even if the departure we’re being nudged into is simply a withdrawal from our own outmoded patterns of thought and behaviour.

That’s the personal exodus Toronto alt-rock band Shoemaker Levee is describing on their current single, “Planning Our Escape.” Like a collective Moses leading the way out of a wilderness of malaise, the group issues an impassioned call to leave the spiritual doldrums behind and head straight for something more edifying and enlightened. Something better.

Some days you’re chasing stones
Dazed, amazed, resigned to walk alone
I’m waking it up, I’m waking it up
I’m planning to escape
Out past the ransacked minds
Shaken awake 

Thirty years ago this month, humanity witnessed a rare sight: A comet measuring nearly 2 kilometres-wide slammed into the planet Jupiter, with a force that would have destroyed the Earth had we been the ones in its path instead. Astronomers named that comet Shoemaker Levy-9.

A few years later—on the far safer terra firma of Newmarket, Ontario—a bunch of indie/alt-rockers decided to christen their new group Shoemaker Levee, in recognition of the momentous celestial occurrence. Fast-forward to 2024, and that group is still going strong with the release of its new single, “Hinterlands,” which hits with the same planet-flattening impact their fiery namesake made all those years ago.

A bracing challenge to our very notions of being, the song paints in broad strokes the existential dilemmas facing every one of us in this highly uncertain era: