Despite having not released new music in two years, BC band Mother Mother is on the charts again, and it’s all thanks to TikTok.
If you have ever listened to an alternative station here in Vancouver, or really anywhere in North America, you know about Mother Mother. With seven LPs under their belt and countless sold out shows, they are Canadian icons. But if you were like me and asked your friends if they wanted to go to a Mother Mother show in high school, they would have no idea who you were talking about. Enter, TikTok.
Initially released in 2016 but really taking off in the mainstream at the start of lockdown in March 2020, TikTok is a video sharing app where users can make short clips using ‘sounds’ and share them with the world. Users can make their own sounds or lip-sync to someone else’s audio, but more often than not these sounds are songs. And these songs go viral fast. Often with a dance or a meme trend attached, users mimic each other and reinvent and edit and create and the algorithm decides what gets popular. Eventually you watch so many videos, the song gets stuck in your head, and the rest is history.
That is exactly what happened with Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’ last month, with a trend so popular Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks even participated.
But Mother Mother’s TikTok story is different. A number of songs from their 2008 album O My Heart just seemed to strike a chord with the TikTok teens and despite no single trend or dance that has caught on, #mothermother has garnered over 60 million views.
The band gained traction initially among gothic fashion and cosplay TikTok, but songs like Arms Tonite and Hayloft that reject genre and social norms have become particularly popular amongst the non-binary and gender-nonconforming people on the app. Many young LGBT+ people have found community in places like TikTok, and they are using the songs to share their stories and creations.
TikTok-ers are using it so much in fact, that the band hit Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Popular Artists chart this month and their Spotify streams are up 183% from August to October 2020.
The band themselves have joined the fun, collecting nearly 400k followers since front man Ryan Guldemond signed up for the app in August. They have also recently started teasing their upcoming eighth studio album, right now only known as #MMLP8, much to both new and old fans delight.