In The End is the new self-released full-length record by Montreal singer, songwriter, and occasional CBC Music celeb, Eve Parker Finley. According to Finley, it’s her “love letter to the feeling of melancholic optimism amidst a world that feels like it’s ending.”

This is black sheep music.

This uplifting, joy bomb of a record gives voice to the beautiful, weird, impossibly charismatic and clumsy misfit sheep that lives inside all of us, begging to baaaaahhhh itself out and hop the fence into the next yard and then wander off into grassy oblivion.

And the bestest, softest, wooliest part of about this warm sweater of an album, which is so new to my turntable yet already so worn out, is that behind all the glittery upbeat, diatonic pop music (or perhaps ahead of it) sit some seriously heavy lyrics about how the world is ending and everything’s fucked.

It’s that wonderful dichotomy of messaging and outlook that Finley somehow wears on her shoulders, the devil of anxiety and the angel of perspective who show up to battle on the couch of her therapist’s office, which makes this collection of songs such a singular feat of artistic triumph. “Melancholic optimism” is basically the two-word version of everything I just wrote…

And yet, some songs are just humorous dumplings of love stories, all steamy and adorably sculpted, bite-sized songlets to pop in when you need a little bit of love yourself.

Can you tell I really, really dig this?

Call me a Montreal nostalgia craver, a mid-aughts beer light dancer, a shame-filled indie-pop college boy heart pounder, or any combination of those words which describe the communal memory we all have for the days before Arcade Fire became sun gods and when you could still live off a steady diet of $0.99 slices, buuuuuut, Finley’s richly saccharine morsels of emo nectar really do quite strongly recall the rare candies of young Owen Pallett, Stars, and Miracle Fortress.

And the community ethos is there too. This album was made collectively, pandemic-ally, over a long stretch of time, alongside a plethora of local collaborators like: Nick Schofield, Cedric Noel, Ky Brooks, Emilie Kahn, and Thanya Iyer. Even if Eve is a seasoned multi-instrumentalist herself, many of the arrangements and production came courtesy of Eve’s fruitful creative partnership with Nick Schofield, the Eno-esque producer and composer responsible for quite a large bit of synth pop and ambient music this city has become known for in recent years.

And then there’s the “Finley four.” At her release concert earlier in 2024, she enlisted her brother Ben to play bass, and the evening featured a tear-inducing ballad performed by the family all together, her father on keyboard, her mother singing, and with Eve on violin. Not a dry eye in the joint!

If love is something multifaceted, complicated, icky and confusing, as Finley’s lyrics often describe, then family is the unconditional playing field that gets to absorb all those metaphors and deliver on its universality.

“Working through stuff” is something none of us can claim as unfamiliar. We’re not born into this world with all the answers, and things get even more tangly when the unkindness of the world makes some of us more vulnerable than others. But patience is essential. And for upbeat pop, this is extremely patient music.

Thematically, the request to “wait for me” feels like a calling out as if to say, “don’t rush me, I need time to figure things out.” Change is hard, but there’s joy in the work of it. Let’s slow things down and enjoy this. Romantically, it also says “I like you, I want you, but I move slowly,” and makes reference to our vulnerability in the most impassioned moments of our lives.

In “Take It Away,” she sings “take me away, far from here, all I wanna do is go somewhere.” “Wait for me” is in this way also a reference to the journey at large, the idea that we’re still imagining a better place and that we’re constantly striving to arrive there. Don’t leave me behind if you find that place, please.

I’m caught between so many color tones here. If you sit on your couch and watch the wall by the window for ten minutes, you’ll see so many warm hues and tones flicker on and off and shimmer. Then you’ll watch those shapes disappear into shadow, reveal themselves softer when they come back, or pierce through blindingly bright.

There really is no light without shadow, and they’re most beautiful when they dance together momentarily only to vanish into thin air shortly after. Optimism without melancholy just isn’t that exciting by comparison.

Listen and purchase here, please.