Concerts

Trust in Men I Trust when they bring their trusty indie pop to Boston

The Canadian trio is playing at Roadrunner on Dec. 14.

Men I Trust play at Roadrunner on December 14. Man of the Hour

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Men I Trust, a Canadian indie trio, is coming to Boston this winter as the last stop on their America tour. They’ll be playing at Roadrunner on Dec. 14 after a tour that kicks off in early November in Columbus and takes them to Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, New Orleans, Nashville, New York City, and Washington, DC, among other cities across the country. Boston is their 26th show and the last stop on the tour.

The band was founded in 2013, as a duo, by high school friends Jessy Caron on bass and guitar and Dragos Chiriac on keys, who released a self-titled EP in 2014 and an album, “Headroom,” in 2015, and played at the Montreal Jazz Festival and Quebec City Summer Festival. In March 2016, they took on Emmanuelle Proulx as singer and guitarist; since Proulx’s addition, they’ve released two more albums, “Oncle Jazz” in 2019 and “Untourable Album” in 2021, plus a bunch of singles.

Traveling between indie rock, electropop, and dream pop, the trio’s sound is beautifully bedroom pop-esque, if bedroom pop got a little bit of oomph.

“Oncle Jazz,” the first album with Proulx, boasts a whopping 24 tracks, which can seem daunting, but the listening experience is actually extremely pleasant, rather than overwhelming. Songs flow into each other nicely, but are (mostly) distinct enough to hold their own. Slightly elevator music-y at times, this is the kind of album that feels like it’s meant to be played in the background, but not in a derogatory way. The album was partially created at Chiriac’s house in rural Quebec, in a town of just over a thousand people, which makes sense given what they produced. They told Billboard that’s where they perfected what they call “the Men I Trust sound.”

“Untourable Album,” their most recent, was a pandemic project where they got a bit more experimental.

“We weren’t even thinking about being able to play the songs live,” said Chiriac in a 2021 interview with Exclaim!. “Because of the whole lockdown, we [thought] we wouldn’t be able to promote it and celebrate it by playing it live. So we wrote songs without having that in mind — more soundscapes and stuff like that.”

The band, even though they have grown in popularity since their formation, remains without a label or a publicist.

“When we finish a song one day, we can release it the day after,” said Proulx to Exclaim!. “Can you imagine having a label that tells you, ‘So we’re going to plan the PR and we’re going to release your album in a year’? It’s impossible for us to picture that; now we have so much creative freedom.”