Men I Trust

Men I Trust is an indie pop band from Quebec City (Canada). Founding members Jessy and Dragos knew each other since their fourth year of high school. Back then (the mid-2000’s), Dragos had somewhat of a background in classical piano and Jessy mastered the dark and esoteric art of the metal guitar soloist. In 2012, while finishing his master’s degree in audio postproduction at Laval University with S. Lacasse, S. Stévance and S. Samson, Dragos spent most of his days and sleeping hours at the “LARC” studio working on his solo projects. He randomly met Jessy again, who was finishing his bachelor degree in Jazz guitar, in one of the faculty’s hallways and talked about doing a French-Touch / Italo-Disco track together. Some weeks later, they did just that. And it worked out so well that they decided to extend their collaboration to a whole project where many singers would be involved. Between 2012 and 2016, all of Jessy’s and Dragos’ (now pursuing a PhD) releases were made as part of Dragos’ masters and PhD studies in order to gain access to the LARC’s infrastructure and to develop a unique sound by mixing and mastering at the same time, achieving loud, large and high quality renders. In 2013, Jessy and Dragos were introduced to Odile by a mutual friend. Odile was then completing her bachelor degree as a classical singer. Her voice struck Jessy and Dragos, already both hardcore classical music fans, by its clarity and power. Odile had no clue what we were about to do when she came at the studio to record the “Introit”, their first baroque essay. She came up with the melody of the voice on the spot and the song became one of Men I Trust’s highlights. After the release of their first album “Men I Trust” (2014), the group had rapid local success in Quebec and made it on several radio, web and paper charts. Emma was a fortuitous encounter. In 2015 a mutual friend presented her to Dragos through a video posted over the Internet. She was casually singing and playing the guitar around a campfire with some of her friends. Emma’s voice was on the opposite spectrum of that of Odile, is less clear, more grainy and fragile with a mysterious twist that caught their attention. They reached her and tried recording one song called “Out In Myself”, which turned out to be one of the band’s easiest to record in Dragos’s small Montreal apartment. The band then invited her to join them on live shows at the beginning of 2015. The girls’ voices blended wonderfully together and the band got lots of positive feedback from the experience. Emma has been part of us since then. With their second album “Headroom” (2015), Men I Trust truly became a quartet. This time, the band’s music echoed outside of Quebec, with many appearances on Hype Machine and several others on Spotify and SoundCloud playlists. In the spring of 2016, the band released their single and first music video for “Humming man”. It was followed in June by “Lauren“ and “Plain View" in December. In 2016, the band was in concert at the Canadian Music Week (Toronto), the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, the Festival d’été de Québec, M for Montreal, Pop Montreal, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing.