How Sleep/less got started

Every band has an origin story. Ours involves a closet, Kijiji, and a show that got booked before we were actually a band.

In the summer of 2018 I stepped back from the metal scene with the idea of starting a solo acoustic project. I spent most of that time on Kijiji looking for musicians for something completely different. That is where I found Beau. One of us had posted an ad, the other responded, and without ever meeting in person we made a plan. He came over, walked into my vocal booth, which was genuinely just a closet, and tracked vocals for a song I had sent him a few days earlier. We never did anything with that song. Something clicked. His voice was exactly what I did not know I was looking for, and right then I knew the direction had to be pop-punk. A real band.

I needed a bassist. I had played with one previously who had since moved down my back lane, so I called him and asked him to track bass on a few ideas. Somewhere between him showing up and us wrapping up, I mentioned we had a show booked and that he was playing it. He had written the parts, so it would be easy enough.

Around the same time, a drummer added me on Facebook. He was also looking to put something together. I pitched the idea, he was in, and before we even had a name we had drum demos being tracked in a garage in Portage la Prairie.

That left the name. I dug up an old notes-app list from the acoustic project that had died a few months earlier. Most of the names were dark and heavy, still in the metal headspace. One stood out: Sleepless. It is a common word, and other bands had already claimed it in some form. Then the slash showed up. I do not remember exactly where it came from, but the second it was Sleep/less it felt right. Different enough to own.

JC, our guitarist, was never really asked to join. He was told he was playing a show. He showed up, played it, and never left. Pretty on brand for how this whole thing came together.

A closet vocal session, a back-lane phone call, a garage in Portage, a dead notes app, and one well placed slash. That is how Sleep/less was born.

Brad Conrad Wiebe