Artist Feature · October 9, 2026
Artist Feature: Virgo Rising’s Wishbone Knows You Can’t Move Back in Time
A return to an old apartment helped shape the Winnipeg quartet’s debut album. The address stayed the same. Life had moved on.
Northern Dial artwork
For Virgo Rising, a Winnipeg indie-rock quartet, the title track of Wishbone began with a place Emily Sinclair wanted to return to: bandmate Lauren Wittmann’s old apartment.
Sinclair first visited around the time the band formed, then moved in years later. She hoped to recover the feeling of finding her people. The same address could not reproduce it.
She described that realization in an Oct. 2 Winnipeg Free Press interview. “You can never go back to the way that it was,” Sinclair told the paper. That realization helped shape Wishbone, the band’s debut full-length.
It gives the title track a more particular ache than nostalgia on its own. Returning is possible. Returning unchanged is the problem.
Lauren Wittmann wrote “Virginia Creeper” about her late grandfather and his garden. Explaining the sound she wanted, she invoked a meteor and a car stereo powerful enough to move the air.
The band develops song ideas together. In a Stylus interview, Sinclair described sharing an idea she disliked, finding that the others were excited by it, and coming to love it after they worked on it together. “For the new album, it’s been all of us all together,” she told Stylus. Jenna Wittmann, Lauren Wittmann and Isaac Tate all contribute to that process.
They even rehearse facing each other in a circle. Moving onto a larger stage, separated by several feet, has taken adjustment. Their collaboration is built around that closeness, both musical and physical.
On Wishbone, released Oct. 2, all four share writing, arranging and production. The credits spread violin, synths, piano and celeste around the familiar guitar, bass and drums.
“Cut My Knee,” now in Northern Dial’s rotation, brings the record’s unease down to a bodily scale. Its published lyrics turn an injury into a question about what other people will assume. Across the title track, “Virginia Creeper” and “Cut My Knee,” a place or a small event becomes something harder to leave alone.
Wishbone follows the EPs Sixteenth Sapphire and Vampyre Year. The band self-produced it, recording with Lino D’Ottavio at No Fun Club and Basement Studio in Winnipeg, with additional engineering from Isaac Tate and mixing by D’Ottavio.