LITTLE WINDOW
PHOTO CREDIT: HEATHER FULTON
1. Glad to feature you here on All the Cores and More! Would you please introduce yourself and what you do in the band?
Hi! My name is Eli Howey, I am an artist and musician, and I play guitar and sing in Little Window.
As a full time artist, I see the band as an art project. We make noise. That noise shapes the aesthetic of our creative goals, whether it’s live sets, videos, records or art shows. I’ve invested my art practice in world building through two dimensional art forms, Little Window is where that gets embodied.
2. Would you please provide some background basics on the band such as when and how you formed, where you’re from, etc.?
We formed in Toronto shortly after I released a solo album called Death Club and I’d been looking for collaborators to build a live set. We first started meeting up in my tiny art studio, drum kit and amps crammed into the corner with dozens of the morbid fluorescent sculptures all over everything. My head was a foot away from the ride cymbal, guitars and mic were feeding back, it was chaos. We switched from acoustic to electric guitar to get things under control, though it just got us playing louder and louder. Garage rock is truly a product of its environment. Matthew, our bassist, joined to help record our first EP Creepy— the tracks on the EP are literally our first time playing together, live off the floor direct to tape. We had been working with wider range of folkier arrangements, but after Creepy, that sound became the blueprint and things just grew from there.
3. Obviously the project extends beyond “just” the music, and I want to dig further into that, but to orient ourselves, who and what, artistically (musically and beyond), would you cite as particularly influential for you? What are the primary influences on Little Window?
When we landed on a sound for the band, I was listening to a lot of Stooges, Joy Division, Stones, Sonic Youth, Green River, Hole and Nirvana. Given what was happening in my life at the time, nostalgia and confrontational, intense and destructive music was really resonating. I was also reading a Courtney Love biography and was like, ok, pursuing music makes sense right now, it’s socially acceptable to rip your heart out and show everyone your pain, even if it’s ugly, repulsive or too much. Honestly, music was the only thing I could do to keep going and keep being creative. I was primarily a painter, but the images in my head were just too messed up after my brother’s death. That was definitely the motivation for me, just moving that energy and Little Window created a habitual place to do that in a direct and confrontational way.
Musically and artistically, I fuck with intensity, as well as creative authenticity and working class people—you really gotta be passionate about what you do, to do it with nothing but vision, self-belief and zero expendable income. Invention is currency, you have no choice. I feel really validated by the stories of people who just jumped despite not knowing what was next. You have to be particularity strong willed I guess, too, or maybe a bit of a freak who is going to respond well to the habitual ego death that comes with being an artist. Creatively, I would also say alt comics, DIY, drag, noise and experimental queer art are hugely influential in shaping Little Window. There’s a high tolerance for weirdness in those communities.
4. Red Ant, your debut LP, comes out October 27th. What is the significance of the title and how does it tie in to the subject matter of the record?
Red Ant synthesizes a lot of symbolic threads. Originally I had been ruminating on the winged ant and polyphenism. Polyphenism allows something to transform or acclimate, taking on a new form, role or characteristic, such as becoming poisonous, changing size, growing wings. It’s a phenomenon that rests at the threshold of a kind of potential that feels supernatural and a liberating expression of creative embodiment. So this was one thread, which didn’t really converge with the album until later on.
At that point (in the initial stages of writing Red Ant), all I knew so far was that lyrically and emotionally the music was about being able to look back at memories that were once too hard to sit with. It was a bit vague to say the least. But my perspective had drastically expanded from 2021 to late 2024 when we started writing the album, and that shift had set a clear tone for those new songs.
It didn't hit me until I wrote the lyrics out to “Dirty Bookshelf,” a song that is in a general sense about fear. It triggered a flashback to a memory from my childhood, where my siblings and I were climbing this lakeside cliff, feigning the courage to jump into the water from the highest ledge. I can 100 percent say we all fully intended on chickening out, but it was a bit of a dare type situation. On the ledge, in a instant of extreme pain, we looked down to see our legs were covered in red ants. We were literally standing in their nest. I vividly remember the collective elation in mid air, all of us having made the same reckless decision to jump, in a brief moment of eye contact before we hit the water.
This flashback was just such a beautiful mirror for where we were at in the present and taking a big, unexpected leap in the face of something extremely painful. I feel like we really distilled that intensity, franticness and excitement into the album.
5. How did the band’s evolution inform the writing of the album? Walk us through the writing and composition of the record.
Like I was saying before, our circumstances really dictated the band’s evolution with our experience recording Creepy having solidified a sound, live off the floor approach and energy for Red Ant.
A big development for the band resulted from my art collective getting the opportunity to take on the lease for a bigger space. Because we all do art and music, we decided to make it a multi-use space, which is now called Terrarium as a effort that strives for different practices to grow together.
And so suddenly Little Window had way more freedom and space to write and rehearse for the album. When I think of Red Ant tracks like “So Many Times,” “Dirty Bookshelf” and “Move,” I can literally feel the difference in the shape of the room and the lack of constriction.
With our sound, we weren’t really chasing a particular genre, we were more focused on staying committed to our approach as a three piece and creating live off the floor arrangements that are tight and intense with big dynamic shifts. With the subject matter of Red Ant, we continued exploring feelings of franticness, discomfort, expansion/collapse, while retaining this sort of haunted quality that stems from the earlier folkier aspects of the project.
Without restricting ourselves to genre, the main challenge writing Red Ant was connecting deeply contrasting sonic environments in the songs and the album as a whole. It’s an extremely energetically demanding writing style; we agonized over these threshold moments to make sure every bit of our songwriting could make it onto the album. This is something we learned a lot about when writing Creepy, too. A song that stands out is the end of “Give It Back,” where we break from the very tight formation of the song to end with these swells and washes of cymbals.
It’s not a passive approach to songwriting, it’s a type of problem solving that results from endlessly throwing yourself at the barrier until a sonic epiphany occurs and the band just locks in and breaks through. Those moments always end up becoming my favourite parts to play live and I hope people feel that. We really fought for these songs.
6. What other forms of art are also integral to the record and how do they all cohere/how are they interrelated? How will these different strands come together for the 2027 tour?
Red Ant brings together a larger creative vision I’ve been pursing with the band since we spawned in the piles of bones, cables, creatures and goo in the corner of my art studio, which is to make a fully immersive handmade world, shaped and merged with the intense sonic intentions of the music. For Red Ant, the sculptures, music and artwork all honour the amazing persistence and roles of these ant beings, (and other creatures associated with decay) that literally carry out the labour of transformation fundamental to all living things.
We created an entire film set of the converging threshold between the natural world and domestic space, deconstructing the absurdity of these converging paradigms. We captured the intense friction of these interactions in a short film for Red Ant with our first single “Goldenrod” as the score, which will be released with the album on October 27th, 2026. An amazing side note, while making the film, the studio became overrun with actual ants, they were literally everywhere and then gone when it all wrapped.
This set/installation will be reassembled in amorphous formats and shared at Red Ant exhibitions, shows and other hybrid events as part of the Red Ant 2027 Tour along with some of the original paintings and artwork that went into creating this genre-bending interdisciplinary project.
It will range from punk shows to full art exhibitions. I can’t wait to bring it all together for people to experience in person. We’re teaming up with Berlin and Leeds duo Klöße for our Canadian and European tours, and a ton of other art and music orgs and collectives to bring the Red Ant freak show to life.
7. If you had access to a significant trove of funds, would that appreciably change the band’s vision? Or would it enable you to simply be more ambitious with what you were able to create? I think of a band like Gallows who took advantage of a major label recording budget and resources to realize their vision and do things they wouldn’t have been able to without it but didn’t compromise their sound or values.
A lot of Little Window’s projects are the result of me saying “what if we…” to the band, and then unleashing a relentless series of events that could take any amount of time/energy to achieve. I often imagine a giant dumpster of money burning when I picture our finances. I think a trove of cash would get a really impressive 20 foot dumpster fire burning! In all honesty, I think a huge amount of funding would help us all sleep a little better at night given the ridiculous amount of work that gets put in to this!
If I was to choose one adventure, I’d love for us to have a work vacation and record for a whole month in a really beautiful location with no stress about financial burdens. Or team up with a bunch of performance artists to make a huge production of something super haunting.
8. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions! Any plugs, shout-outs, or last words for the readers?
Obviously I have to plug our release show at Terrarium this October 29th! We will have the whole installation set up and have tons of wild stuff planned, including artwork and musical offerings from my Earth Punk studio-mates Zanette Singh and Kikeyah.
Klöße (Bobby Glew and Claire Panthère) will also be releasing a new album ahead of our spring tour, we will share dates and news about that closer to!
Zanette Singh IG: @gutflora_
Kikeyah IG: @Kikeyah
Claire Panthère (Klöße) IG: @shyfoam
Bobby Glew (Klöße) IG: @3d_beat