“You can spend your entire life chasing hits, but then when you’re your truest self, people really come out to support you,” says Kevin Comeau of the powerhouse Canadian duo Crown Lands. “When you just let you be you and let your freak flag fly, all of a sudden you get the biggest fan response, the biggest press, people coming out of the woodwork saying ‘This is the kind of music I love!’“

In the spring, Crown Lands—Comeau (guitar, bass and keys) and Cody Bowles (vocals and drums)—broke through with two songs that returned them to their prog-rock roots and pointed the way to a limitless future. “Context: Fearless Pt. 1” and “Right Way Back” premiered with Rolling Stone with “Right Way Back” named “Rockest Record of the Week” on BBC1, while CBC Music wrote that “Crown Lands’ epic, sci-fi-laced ‘Context: Fearless Pt. 1’ is a mic-dropping display of virtuosity.” Most recently, Crown Lands received their first Juno Awards nominations, for Rock Album of the Year and Breakthrough Group of the Year, taking home the award for Breakthrough Group. The band also signed a deal with Spinefarm Records, which will be working with Universal Music Canada to support their upcoming releases in the U.S. and U.K.

Now the group returns with two new songs, “White Buffalo” and “The Oracle,” which extend their musicality and their ambition even further. “White Buffalo,” produced by three-time Grammy winner David Bottrill (Tool, Mastodon, Peter Gabriel), is the third installment in a series of songs addressing indigenous rights, following “Mountain” and “End of the Road.”

“The white buffalo is a symbol of prosperity and strength in indigenous cultures,” says Bowles (whose own heritage is half Mi’kmaw, an Indigenous tribe from Nova Scotia), “so the song is about reclamation and overcoming oppression. We wanted to make something that was our projection of the future we hope will manifest.”

“When we took a step back,” adds Comeau, “we saw that ‘Mountain’ was about what happened, and ‘End of the Road’ talked about what is happening, so we wanted to write about what will happen.”