Funeral Lakes - Mountains Turned To Dust EP
- Samuel Stevens
- Sep 20
- 3 min read
Funeral Lakes have always written songs that sit in the tension between myth and memory, history and inheritance. On their new EP, Mountains Turned to Dust, which was released on September 19, 2025, the Kingston, Ontario–based duo of Chris Hemer and Sam Mishos expand their indie rock palette into a realm tinted with country and western hues—not to embrace the genre’s storied mythologies, but to unravel them. What results is a collection of anti-western songs that challenge the cowboy archetype and the legacy of westward expansion, reminding listeners that these stories still haunt the present.
Across five tracks, Funeral Lakes lean into galloping rhythms, spring-soaked guitar twang, and dusty, cinematic arrangements, only to undercut them with lyrics that strip away the veneer of heroism associated with frontier myths. It’s music that feels both familiar and estranged—using the language of the Western to critique its destructive legacy.
The opening number, “Ride On,” sets the tone with a canter of drums and a windswept guitar line, conjuring wide-open landscapes that feel less romantic than desolate. Hemer and Mishos weave their voices around images of displacement and longing, framing motion not as freedom but as exile.
On “Dreaming of Heroes,” the band sharpens its focus on the figures enshrined by settler mythology. Over pulsing bass and reverb-heavy chords, Hemer's and Mishos’s vocals collide together and carry a mix of lament and accusation, asking who gets remembered as heroic and who is erased in the process. The interplay of their harmonies underscores the tension between reverence and reckoning.
The EP’s centrepiece, “No More Cowboys,” delivers the sharpest subversion. What begins with a swaggering groove soon collapses into a mournful refrain, calling for an end to the cowboy as a symbol of conquest. Here, Funeral Lakes lean most heavily into western tropes, only to dismantle them in real time. It’s a standout track, both musically and thematically.
“The Valleys Wept” is steeped in atmosphere—ghostly keys, aching guitar swells, and restrained percussion—painting a portrait of landscapes marked by extraction and abandonment. The song captures what the band calls “prairie madness,” the psychological toll of a land carved up and commodified.
Finally, the title track, “Mountains Turned to Dust,” strips back the instrumentation almost entirely, leaving space for Hemer’s stark storytelling. At once ancestor and descendant, the narrator reckons with the inheritance of violence and the collapse of what once seemed eternal. It’s Funeral Lakes at their most vulnerable and devastating, closing the EP with the weight of history pressing down like a long shadow.
The EP’s production, engineered in both Kingston and Jonas Bonnetta’s Port William Sound studio, balances clarity with rawness. Bonnetta’s mixing gives the songs a widescreen quality, while Heather Kirby’s mastering ensures the dynamics remain intact, letting quiet moments breathe and crescendos hit hard. The cover art—a stitched intervention on an archival photograph of a faceless rider—mirrors the music’s purpose: to unpick and reframe the imagery of the frontier.
With Mountains Turned to Dust, Funeral Lakes prove themselves adept not only at crafting evocative soundscapes but also at interrogating the narratives embedded in them. By borrowing from country and western traditions only to twist them inside out, they’ve created a record that feels timely and timeless, rooted in the land yet unafraid to expose its scars. It’s a haunting reminder that the past isn’t gone—it’s riding alongside us, in every valley and mountain that bears its weight.
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