David Newfeld does not produce albums that ask to be ignored. His body of work with Broken Social Scene established a template for Canadian indie production that the decade following spent years processing: the layered urgency, the emotional seriousness that never tips into self-importance, the sense that every sound on the recording was chosen because it was the right sound and not because it was the convenient one. When Newfeld attached his name to Program's debut material and described their music as what Echo and the Bunnymen or Simple Minds wish they could have been generating twenty-five years later, that was not a casual endorsement. It was a specific and confident argument about the quality of what he was hearing.
The video for "Waiting," directed by Amos Le Blanc and premiered in March 2013, makes its own argument in the same register. It is quiet, serious work from a director who had not yet released a video that made the mainstream press, but who was operating at a level of visual intelligence that the mainstream press would soon have no choice but to recognize.
Program and the Shoegaze Inheritance
Program are a Toronto band who arrived carrying a specific set of influences with enough clarity that you could name the lineage without effort: the post-punk atmospherics, the guitar tones that push into texture rather than melody, the vocal approach that treats the voice as another instrument in the arrangement rather than the lead element everything else serves. The name change from Volcano Playground marked a shedding of something and an assertion of something else, a cleaner, more austere identity that matched the direction the music was taking.
"Waiting" is a song about perfectionism, self-doubt, depression, and the particular experience of arriving at your purpose later than the world seems to expect. The band described it as deeply personal, as addressing the feeling of being beaten and cut to pieces and then taped back together, indefinitely. This is not casual thematic territory. This is not a song about a broken relationship or a good night out. This is a song about the inside of a specific kind of psychological experience, and it required a visual translation that could honor that specificity without reducing it.
Le Blanc understood this. The video does not illustrate the lyrics. It does not literalize the metaphors. It creates a tonal environment that runs parallel to the song's emotional argument without ever trying to explain it, trusting the viewer to feel what the images are doing rather than understand it analytically.
A Director in His Formative Year
In 2013, Le Blanc was still building his vocabulary. "Waiting" arrived before "Asphyxiation" for Autoerotique, before "Dum Dee Dum" for Keys N Krates, before "Run This" for Thugli. It is, in a meaningful sense, one of the documents of a major directorial sensibility in the process of discovering what it wanted to be.
What is already present in "Waiting" is the thing that will define everything Le Blanc does in the years ahead: the restraint. The refusal to fill every moment. The confidence that a held image communicates more than a busy one, that silence in the edit is not absence but emphasis, that the director's job is to make a film that breathes rather than one that shouts.
For a band whose music operates in the sustained and atmospheric, this sensibility is a perfect match. Le Blanc shoots Program as if they are already exactly what Newfeld said they were: a band whose music deserves to be taken seriously, framed accordingly, presented to the audience without apology or excessive explanation.
What Newfeld Made and Le Blanc Found
The collaboration between Program and David Newfeld produced material that sits in an unusual position in the Toronto indie landscape of 2013: music that is explicitly referential to a lineage of post-punk and shoegaze and yet does not feel like pastiche, because the emotional weight behind it is genuine and the production decisions consistently serve that weight rather than the reference.
Newfeld's studio, Stars and Suns, has a particular character. Recordings made there tend to carry a warmth that more sterile digital environments do not produce, a sense of physical presence in the sound, bodies in a room making organized noise together. "Waiting" has this quality, and Le Blanc's visual choices acknowledge it by working in a register that is similarly tactile, similarly present, similarly resistant to the clean distance of something manufactured rather than felt.
The Stereofox review that appeared in the video's wake recognized the emotional honesty of what Program had made and the care with which the visual component supported it. These were not large publications. They were the publications that paid attention in 2013 to music that deserved attention but had not yet accumulated the audience that would eventually find it.
The Quiet Work That Builds Everything
Not every significant piece of work arrives with a viral moment attached to it. Some of the most important things a director makes are the ones that circulate slowly, that find their audiences over time, that accumulate meaning as the career around them develops and retroactively illuminates what was present from the beginning.
"Waiting" is that kind of work for Amos Le Blanc. It does not have the single-weekend momentum of "Asphyxiation." It does not have the cultural scaffolding of a Prism Prize nomination. What it has is a quality of attention and intention that marks every good director's early work: the sense that the person behind the camera is taking this as seriously as it deserves to be taken, and that this seriousness is the beginning of something.
In March 2013, watching "Waiting," you were watching a major directorial career begin. The subsequent work made that clear. But it was clear here first, for anyone paying attention.
