The Sun Harmonic Proves the "Glory Days" Aren’t Behind Us

The Sun Harmonic has never been about gloss; they’re built on grit and straight-up honesty. With their new single “Glory Days,” the Ontario trio proves they’re not here to play safe. Frontman Kaleb Hikele, with longtime co-conspirators Dave Skrtich and Ian McLennan, tracked this one live off the floor. No tricks, no polish, just raw spirit straight from punk, hard rock, and rock & roll’s backbone. The result? A song that doesn’t just play, it punches.

“Glory Days” sounds like it was born in a sweaty club with beer-sticky floors and fists in the air. But don’t get it twisted, this isn’t empty-volume rock. Hikele first scribbled the track in 2016, working manual labor, staring out the back of a delivery van, wondering if the so-called “best years” were already behind him. Originally a folk ballad, the song morphed into something louder, angrier, and harder to ignore.

Post-pandemic, its meaning hits different. What started as one guy wrestling with his mid-20s turned into a generational cry. “Every time I think of this song, I’m singing it for those who feel like the pandemic has left our best years behind us,” Hikele says. It’s not nostalgia, it’s protest. Distorted, defiant, and reminding us that rock has always been the soundtrack of survival.

The mix, handled by Brian Moncarz, keeps the band’s fire at the front. The guitars snarl, the rhythm section never blinks, and the whole thing feels lean and feral. Three instruments, one voice, zero filler. It’s punk attitude meets classic rock familiarity, the kind of track you’re already screaming along to before the chorus even lands.

The real power of “Glory Days”? It flips the idea of “back then” on its head. It’s not about clinging to the past; it’s about claiming right now. As Hikele puts it: “Your glory days are never over. It’s all perspective.” That’s not just a lyric, it’s a mantra.

With “Glory Days” and a seventh album on the way, The Sun Harmonic has leveled up from a one-man project to a full-force rock unit. This is stage-built music. Music that heals through noise. Music that demands connection. And music that proves your glory days aren’t gone, you’re living them.

Kaleb, how did "Glory Days" transform from a folk ballad into the full-throttle rock anthem it is today?

A lot of time, patience, and curiosity. The acoustic version with a capo on the 6th fret originally built the verse and chorus progression, but when I let go of that key, it introduced the whole minor chord progression in the intro. Basically, that gave way to the genre of a harder/louder rock song. The riff in the bridge followed next.

Singing it at the top of my lungs was simply a matter of transposing it up an octave from its original key in the folk version. Sometimes songs can flow between two genres like that, or others stay in one form forever. This was always one of my favourites to keep playing in both versions, same thing I always loved about a Sun Harmonic song called Recycled Words (Google it!) 

The song reflects on both personal struggles and global turbulence. How do you balance the personal and political in your songwriting?

Songs will always be given a new meaning by the listener. Even if you write about politics, it can mirror someone's inner experience. Or write something personal that reflects the outer world, etc. It makes me think of a very old song of mine from 2007 that I originally wrote about the Iraq war at that time, but I realized it was metaphorical to things going on in my own life at home, too.

I love the duality; you can sing this song as an internal cry for help, now that your own glory days are gone, or the loss is right in front of you now. Or, it's a wake-up call about the external world around us - what are we doing killing each other while the planet kills us? It harks back to that Wrong Place at the Wrong Time trope - do you ever feel like you were supposed to be born in another era?

What was it like recording the track live off the floor with the band compared to your earlier solo work?

It's entirely about the energy of a performance. Three people in a room, playing the song together, in this case without a Click Track of any kind. We did nine takes of this song! Twice as many as the rest of the album. Because it wasn't right until all of a sudden, Take 9, it EXPLODED. We improvised parts, slowed down, sped up; it was so alive. I had goosebumps.

So, minus the studio tricks afterwards, you're listening to a live band performance with only the studio engineers as an audience. As for my early solo work, especially The Sun Harmonic albums, it sounded like a five-piece rock group, or a 10-piece jazz or soul band, or even a 50-piece orchestra on one song.

I played and overdubbed all of the instruments myself, so there was no limit to it. What's happened since is that with more people in the studio, there are fewer tracks to arrange and mix into the song. We record off the floor, I double-track my guitars, maybe add organ, or some hand percussion, plus the group vocals and harmonies. Bam!

It's still a three-piece band, with overdubs, instead of a single person creating a puzzle pieced recording that will never be matched on stage by the same One Man Band as it is in the studio. I'm really glad this song took the form of our live performance, the way it would be in a dive bar.

Do you see "Glory Days" as a turning point for The Sun Harmonic's sound moving into the new album?

Absolutely. This song was the soundtrack to our first few years as a band, one of the early songs in our repertoire that hadn't been released yet. So we worked on it for a long time, changing parts, adding, and subtracting from the arrangement. When we recorded this song in a group of other songs, it was one of the loudest tracks by far. In a way, we pushed for it to BE as loud and rock and roll as it is now.

We could have dialed it back in so many ways. But I whispered to Dave, before Take 9 in the studio, "Hey, play it a little faster"... And so it goes. The next Sun Harmonic album we're writing - spoiler alert - is almost all faster, louder, heavier rock than most of the songs on this upcoming Self-titled album. It's more Glory Days types of songs, times ten that'll make up the next album.

So yes, you're right, it's the direction of the band, being foreshadowed by a song that took almost a decade to come to be. Put it this way, if we'd released this song when it was written in 2016, or even when it was recorded in December 2021, it would have been talking about different "glory days". They have certainly kept slipping away since then. And now, it's our glory days. 

What do you hope fans feel when they shout along to this track at your shows?

I hope they feel that GLORY DAYS KEEP SLIPPING AWAY! And they thoroughly love that feeling as they belt it out, at the live show or while they're listening to the recording, forever and ever.