An Offbeat by CFUV Review
Photo via @cootiecatcher69 on Bandcamp.
With the release of their third studio album Something We All Got, Cootie Catcher are professing themselves as Canada’s indie pop darlings. Following their 2025 release Shy at First, a DIY collage of sounds, the quartet returned in less than a year with their first studio-recorded album –– and their first since signing with CarPark Records.
Their lo-fi soundscape remains clear in illustrating a world of pure juxtapositions: acoustic and electric, innocent and self-reflective, saccharine and elegiac. Cootie Catcher’s iconic sound style can be described as a swirling assortment of samples, instruments, and voices, all coming together in a disjointed collection that just works.
The band formed as a duo in 2021, with Anita Fowl (vocals, bass) and Nolan Jakupovski (vocals, guitar) as its core founders. Joined by Sophia Chavez (vocals, synths) and later Joseph Shemoun (percussion), the four have formed a group heralding the twee revival of the 2020s. Now associated with the laptop twee movement featured in the Pitchfork article “The Top Five Musical Rabbit Holes of 2025,” Cootie Catcher is reinventing samplepop of a bygone era. Their merging of crafty aesthetics with stock samples recalls an optimistic embrace of DIY indie pop with nearly antiquated electronic sounds.
As each identifiable piece presents itself, whether that be a toy piano or a sample of compressed speech as featured in “Quarter Note Rock,” each member contributes the auditory equivalent to a trinket on a shelf. Much in the same way, each fully realized song forms a square on the musical quilt of Something We All Got –– a quilt that brings you back to childhood, and makes you all the more prepared to face adulthood.
Lyrically, the language is simple, but backed with airs of melancholy. The band holds an air of hopeful and heartfelt, culminating in songs that explore the coming-of-age in early adulthood. Observations of a deteriorating relationship are drawn out in their single “Gingham Dress,” released in November of last year. The final verse ends with “Pseudo wife, I tried my best / Convalescence next,” matching the underwhelming feelings of defeat to a cautious optimism for what’s to come.
Materiality is key to Cootie Catcher’s ethos. The clear distinction of instruments both electronic and acoustic celebrate each member’s skill with supporting samples. Altogether, the sound direction builds an imaginative and playful world, where the electronic can sound organic. Songs such as “Quarter Note Rock” unravel with a clearly human grasp on the instruments, with Shemoun ending the track through an emotive drum solo backed by everpresent programmed drums. These recurring electronic samples, like the fluttering percussion on “Rhymes with Rest” or the choppy vocal samples near the climax of “Puzzle Pop,” creates a paradoxical organism in the chorus of indietronica. This aggregation of materials, from digital to physical samples, delightfully parallels the thematic mess of emotions that run throughout.
In the sweeping storm of their album release, Cootie Catcher has attained significant prominence in the music world. Recently, Something We All Got was announced on the longlist for the 2026 Polaris Music Prize, alongside acts like Angine de Poitrine, Men I Trust, and PUP.
Having performed with fellow indie groups Phoebe Rings and Good Flying Birds, the group also made a significant appearance supporting twee pop legends Heavenly in Toronto this April.
Accolades for Cootie Catcher resound across North America, with the new album being featured on CFUV’s charts as well as “Puzzle Pop” being the number 1 track of 2026 for New York University’s campus station, WYNU.
Cootie Catcher will be playing in Victoria at Friendship Hall, run by the Victoria Native Friendship Centre, as part of their North America tour on June 27, 2026, presented by the Action Index. Victoria bands Savy and Shoplifter will be supporting them.
