Fiver - Fiver Trois presents Cleaning House

Written By Hiroki Tanaka

You’ve Changed Records

Release on June 19th, 2026

I had the fortune of staying in Prince Edward Island during the period I chose to review the new album from Simone Schmidt, aka Fiver. As I played Fiver Trois presents Cleaning House while traveling along the southern coast, I was struck by the sparseness of the maritime architecture and rugged landscape; derelict farmhouses along Highway 1, rolling forested hills hugged by the ocean. I could imagine Schmidt finishing these tracks from across the Northumberland Strait in Sackville, inspired to purge them while surrounded by the quiet expanse.

Cleaning House finds Schmidt expanding their sound alongside a merry band of psych-fried folk players: pedal steel player Dani Crowther, drummer Nathan Doucet, and bassist Jeremy Costello. Together, they delve into what is essentially a collection of unreleased material and ideas accumulated over the last five years. The record serves as a musical reproduction of a process Schmidt undertook years prior at the suggestion of a psychic. Schmidt purged their apartment of "stuck energy" by putting everything that previously belonged to someone else in one room, tracing a chalk circle around it, and saying the spell. This collection of songs represents what they chose to keep.

The immediate highlight is the opener, “Glutton for Time,” which unfurls as a seven-minute epic. The rhythm section of Doucet and Costello provides effortless tone shifts, moving from laid-back country-folk into a bossa-nova-lite rhythm and an expansive jam-band groove, all while Schmidt and Crowther swirl above with melting, improvisational lines.

While previous Fiver excursions, such as the phenomenal research-folk project Audible Songs From Rockwood or the Polaris-nominated Fiver with the Atlantic School Of Spontaneous Composition, were bound by strict narrative frameworks, Cleaning House has Schmidt pushing their range into looser, new territories. From the grunge intro of “That’s a Joke” to the strident vocal yodel on “R.J.D.,” Schmidt tests out fresh angles to interrogate familiar themes of memory, injustice, and (spiritual and physical) burnout.

The timelessness of their songwriting is best exemplified in “Only in the Longing,” a piece of rustic folk as focused on activist concerns as internal reflection. Over subtle, moving instrumentation, Schmidt delivers striking poetry on systemic struggle: "Love is recidivist, Justice a gnawing that insists on this / it’s only in the longing they are known." It is delivered with a Watson-esque warble that belies its lofty abstraction.

Fiver Trois presents Cleaning House stands as an intriguing clearing of the decks. By opening the vault and sifting through the clutter of the past, Fiver delivers a document of transition, untethered to current trends, deeply collaborative, and capturing an artist in the middle of resetting their frame.

Hiroki Tanaka

Hiroki Tanaka is a Toronto-based guitarist, singer-songwriter, and writer. When he isn't thrashing on stage in a traditional hyottoko mask with his backing band, he is channeling his Japanese-Canadian heritage into high-concept art rock. A former lead guitarist for the Juno and Polaris-nominated YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN, Hiroki recently released his sophomore solo album, Isan. As a writer, his poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Metatron Press, and he was shortlisted for the Janice Colbert Award in 2017. He has also contributed words to Weird Canada and the Canadian music blog DOMINIONATED, where he curated their first music festival, HEAR HERE Fest, in Vancouver.

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