Wares leader Cassia Hardy has released a solo single paying tribute to the Empress Ale House, an Edmonton pub and venue that shut down back in 2020 — and, in doing so, has created a hazy love letter to the rose-tinted memories of early adulthood.
“Empress” mixes a lo-fi electronic pulse with brittle guitar strums and Hardy’s punk-inflected vocal yelps, as she reminisces about howling at the moon from the gravel parking lot and “passing that same hundred bucks around” — but it’s in the instrumental breaks that the nostalgia really hits home, with gorgeous string synths that evoke the bleary romance of the Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.”
Hardy said in a statement:
This song is a composite photo, in memory of a few places close to my heart as a patron and a worker. Head and shoulders above them was the Empress. I can still see the way it looked at last call, when the house lights went up. Animal skulls lined the blood red walls, the dark wooden tables at once sticky and slippery. We served beer by the imperial pint, free pretzels, and a petrified $30 hungry man dinner in the freezer to satisfy the license.
Like any good pub, the Empress was a multi-generational hub, a rock club, a dusty 100 year old prairie saloon, a listening room, a political salon and the city’s preeminent lesbian hangout, depending on the night. It reigned for 13 years, and it didn’t have to end, either. As unique as it was, like so many other places, the landlords got greedy and didn’t know what they were messing with.
Some folks who went might never know what happened, some might not care to, and more and more will never have seen it at all. Sometimes the sweet things in life don’t burn out or fade away, they are taken. It’s a weed store now after sitting vacant for a year.
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