Mama’s Broke — the Nova Scotian duo of Amy Lou Keeler and Lisa Maria — have announced their next album. Reunion arrives on August 28th via Free Dirt Records and Forward Music Group, and lands today with a new single and video, The Nameless.
When we shared the pair’s single Heaven in April, a record was promised but unnamed. Reunion now has a title and a date, and it picks up where Heaven left off: a song cycle about a world coming apart in plain sight. The album traces fractured communities, eroding common ground, and the dawning sense that the systems we were told to trust no longer hold. As the band put it, the songs don’t preach or prescribe. They reflect, holding up a mirror and leaving room for something else to take shape.
That instinct is one the duo described to us in 2022, around their last album. “I definitely feel there is a place for it, just like there always has been in a lot of folk music,” Lisa Maria said of writing into hard subjects, in our Narrow Line interview. Amy Lou was wary of the obvious route: “we would just sneak it in, maybe allude to it… a thing that I don’t really love is when things are super heavy-handed.”
The Nameless carries that method. The band describe the song’s subjects as women “often reduced, in memory and history, to narrow, simplified roles, their complexity stripped away in favour of labels they are expected to embody, whether flawlessly or tragically.” The song gives four of them a verse each: the scorned lover, known only by the man who left; the so-called callous mother, judged on her failures and not her struggles; the victim of domestic violence folded into a statistic while sympathy lingers on the man who harmed her; and the missing daughter, whose disappearance calls up the Highway of Tears, the stretch of British Columbia road where many women, a disproportionate number of them Indigenous, have vanished. Headlines and acronyms, the band note, never carry the full weight of a life.
Nicole Cecile Holland filmed the accompanying video on 16mm in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Reunion follows Narrow Line (2022), which earned a JUNO nomination and took the duo to NPR’s Tiny Desk in 2023:
Reviewing that album for KLOF, Danny Neill singled out its title track, where “meditations on the climate crisis, violence against immigrants and wealth disparity all combine to paint a solemn portrait of the modern world” without offering easy answers. The same nerve runs through The Nameless. So does the duo’s habit of letting darkness and light collide: Neill called Narrow Line “folk music as open-heart surgery, unflinchingly getting its hands dirty in a mess of real-life whilst still locating the humanity within.”
That reach goes back to the start. Neill championed their self-released 2019 debut Count The Wicked, a set of songs unafraid of public hangings, alcohol dependency and the dark claws breaking through the floorboards of folk tradition.
On the new album, Keeler plays guitar, banjo, shruti box; Lisa Maria moves between fiddle, mandolin, guitar, and banjo, with both sharing the vocals and the writing. On various tracks they are also joined by a number of guest musicians, including Paul Kowert, Philippe Bronchtein and Bill Allison. Forged across years of busking and trading songs through Eastern Canada, Appalachia, Ireland and beyond, their folk-without-borders approach has only sharpened.
Reunion is out August 28th via Free Dirt Records and Forward Music Group. The Nameless is out now.
Pre-Order Reunion: https://mamasbroke.bandcamp.com/album/reunion
Mama’s Broke on Tour now with support from the previously featured Creekbed Carter Hogan, Jude Brothers, Makeshift Hammer, + Wes Pearce
Tour Dates
May 27 – Bar Le Ritz PDB, Montreal, QC
May 27 – La Source de la Martinière, Quebec, QC
May 29 – Charlotte Street Arts Centre, Fredericton, NB
May 30 – The Sanctuary Arts Centre, Dartmouth, NS
May 31 – Evergreen Theatre, Margaretsville, NS
June 3 – Trailside Music Hall, Charlottetown, PE
Aug 8 – Green Parrot Festival, Cologne, DE
Aug 14- Cloggeroo Festival, Georgetown PEI
Sept 26/27 – Sisters Folk Festival, Sisters, OR