Sinclaire - Attention [Vinyl]

Attention, Sinclaire’s sole full-length album was originally released in 2000. The album saw the band evolve their style from brooding post-hardcore group to a more pop-friendly sound indebted to Rick Springfield and the burgeoning Midwestern emo sound of The Get Up Kids and The Promise Ring.

Guitarist and lyricist Ian Murray would go on to state, "We wanted a record that could reflect that side of ourselves without losing what we loved from our earlier music. The first song, The Secret Weapon, was specifically about this shift. It was a declaration that we were not going to be as angsty, as self-serious, as… well, emo. I wrote a choppy rock riff that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Loverboy album, and we went from there."

The band decided to do their own playful take on boy bands of the era through the lens of post-hardcore melodic rock. In fact, the original title of this album, Attention Teenage Girls, was inspired by the way boy bands at the time tried so desperately to appeal to a young female audience.

For this re-release, the band has tweaked the album name. When removed from the specific context of that time, the group don’t think the satire of the original album title really lands anymore. They didn't want the original album title to feel exclusionary or otherwise be a barrier to someone discovering this for the first time without all that context from the year 2000. The songs hold up even if the satire didn’t.

The album was originally recorded the album over a week in the spring of 2000 with Ian Blurton at Chemical Sound in Toronto. The album was remixed and remastered from the original tapes by Jon Drew.