Caylie Runciman, who records as Boyhood.
Boyhood Recorded I’ll Dream InStead on a Bed and an Old Casio
Caylie Runciman, who records as Boyhood.
The press image for the record is a single photograph of Caylie Runciman holding a sheet of clouded acetate flat against her own face. One eye is visible through it. Everything else is diffused into red. It is a precise piece of staging for an album made almost entirely alone, and it sets up the release better than any biography would.
I’ll Dream InStead is the fourth album under her Boyhood alias, and it arrives on 23 October through the Toronto label Hand Drawn Dracula. Runciman wrote it, performed it, recorded it and engineered it herself, in rural Ontario, across a winter she has described as leaving her cooped up and lonely.
The Sheet Over the Face
Boyhood has never presented as a confessional project, which is part of why the acetate reads correctly. The persona has always been slightly withheld: a masculine alias for a woman songwriter, an Instagram handle that reads @frankenshredder, cover images that obscure as often as they reveal.
What has changed is the direction underneath the styling. The label describes Runciman on this record as metamorphosing, and she has been plain about a period of upheaval preceding it. She has said she was imploding with life changes and feeling a resurgence through the chaos, which is a more useful description of the album’s tone than any genre tag.
One Bed, Old Drum Machines and a Casio
The recording setup is the detail that keeps getting repeated in coverage, and for once the trivia is load-bearing. Most of I’ll Dream InStead was made on her bed, surrounded by old drum machines and, in her own phrasing, a crappy old Casio. She followed her whims through tape delay, building choppy, cycling soundscapes underneath the vocal.
This is bedroom pop in the literal sense rather than the marketing sense, and the constraint is audible in the finished thing. The label’s own description reaches for tough-kid guitar grit, dusty synths, analog feedback loops and deadpan verses. Those are the sounds of one person with limited equipment and unlimited time, which is a specific and increasingly rare production position.
It also puts her in a lineage the site has covered before, of pop records built out of whatever hardware was to hand. The percussion made with a hair straightener belongs to the same instinct: the gear is not the point, the speed of capture is.
The album was not finished in isolation. It was mixed by James Bunton at Slow Go Sound and mastered by Heather Kirby at Dreamlands Mastering, according to the release listing, which is where the bed recordings acquire their finish.
What Desperation Sounds Like on Tape
Runciman has said the album stemmed from a feeling of desperation, and the label frames the songs as carrying a backed-up-against-the-wall determination cultivated obsessively in isolation. That reads as press copy until you look at how she describes the working method, which was compulsive and instinctive rather than considered.
The record documents its own process on the track “Working”, where she sings: “I’ve got to do it quick / or else it goes away / and if it goes it’s gone.” That is a writer describing a capture window rather than a craft, and it explains a lot about why the arrangements stay rough at the edges.
Around it she has described a turn towards what she calls lonesome fantasy through the winter: tarot cards, set intentions, lit candles. The outcome, in her account, was recovery rather than collapse. She has said she really found herself again with this record, and that she feels more in touch with herself as an artist than at any point in her life.
Loner Is a Joke She Is In On
The lead single is “Loner”, released alongside the announcement in July with a video directed, shot and edited by Phil Osborne. It is the most immediately legible thing on the record, and Runciman’s account of it is the single best guide to the album’s register.
“Loner is about being, literally, a loner – but a content one,” she told press. “Feeling lonely but recognising your contentedness in it – it’s also quite tongue & cheek; I like to take the piss out of myself.”
That last clause is the tell. The songs are built out of a genuinely difficult winter, but the delivery is dry rather than plaintive, which is what stops the deadpan reading as flatness. KLOF Mag described the single as a wry, warmly defiant anthem of solitude, and the balance of those two words is right.
Four Albums From an Ottawa Punk Start
Boyhood is more than a decade old as a project, having started in Ottawa’s punk scene, and Runciman has built a run of albums and Canadian festival appearances since, including Sled Island, NXNE and Pop Montreal.
The immediate predecessor was 2022’s My Dread, a more painstaking record that mirrored her introduction to motherhood. It was mixed by Kenny Gilmore, whose credits include Julia Holter, and it drew the kind of notice that positions an artist for exactly the sort of self-produced fourth album she has now made.
The through-line across those four records is a refusal to scale the presentation up in step with the attention. She is still recording alone, still on domestic furniture, still routing everything through equipment she is happy to call crappy in an interview.
Why a Fourth Album Sounds Like a First
There is a pattern independent artists tend to follow at this stage, and Boyhood has declined it. The usual arc after a well-received record made with an outside mixer is upward: a bigger studio, a producer with a name, a rhythm section, a budget that has to be recouped. My Dread put Runciman within reach of that route. She went the other way and cut the collaborators out of the tracking process entirely.
That decision has consequences you can hear. Self-engineering removes the second opinion, which is usually described as a loss and is sometimes a gain. Nobody talked her out of the deadpan. Nobody smoothed the feedback loops or suggested the drum machines be replaced with something that reads as current. The choppy, cycling arrangements survive into the finished record because the person making them was also the person deciding when they were finished.
It also changes the economics. An album written, played, recorded and engineered by one person on domestic equipment carries almost no recording cost, which is what makes a 300-copy vinyl run a viable plan rather than a rounding error against a studio invoice. The label handles the pressing and the release; the record itself arrived already paid for.
The trade is time and risk. Runciman spent a winter on it in a house she was rarely leaving, with no external deadline forcing a decision, and by her own account the writing was compulsive rather than scheduled. That is a method with a high failure rate. It produced eight tracks here, which is a modest number, and the modesty looks deliberate rather than apologetic.
Eight Tracks, Three Hundred Records
The album runs to eight tracks: “Loner”, “A Grand Time”, “Waiting For Something”, “Sparkle Dub//I’ll Dream InStead”, “Pissing In The Snow”, “Working”, “Fast10” and “DUI”. The titles carry the same deadpan the songs do.
It is available digitally at 24-bit, and on a limited orchid-coloured 12″ pressing capped at 300 copies. That number is worth stating plainly, because a 300-copy run is a decision about scale rather than a supply constraint, and it is consistent with everything else about the release.
Runciman toured North America through the summer ahead of the album, opening in Toronto at Dina’s Tavern in late July before Ottawa, Montreal, Fredericton and Sappyfest in Sackville, then crossing into the United States for dates in Burlington, Brooklyn, Providence and Brattleboro, several of them alongside Eliza Niemi. Exclaim! carried the full itinerary with the announcement.
What the schedule shows is an artist moving at her own pace rather than a campaign timed to a release date. The album lands in October; the touring happened in July and August; the record was finished on a bed months before either. On the evidence of the label’s own framing, that is the intended order of operations, and the acetate over the face is the sleeve note for it.
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