Have a Good Summer, Jane
H.A.G.S. debut album | June, 2026 | Listen Here
Reviewed by Katherine Abbass
On my first night out after moving to St. John’s in August, I walked down to the Peter Easton Pub for some live music. I was a new student in the English MA program at MUN, and I’d heard about a girlband that had formed from the students in that program a couple years before me. The band was called H.A.G.S. — Have A Good Summer — and I was lucky to have learned about them when I did, because their Peter Easton performance would be their last of the year.
H.A.G.S. shows are a seasonal delight: the group performs only in the summer. But this past winter, the girls of H.A.G.S. (Jess Richardson, Nicole Haldoupis, Eve Chamely, and Jane Goulding) kept busy during their off-season, recording the seven tracks that make up their debut album, Have A Good Summer, Jane. Short and sweet, these songs will do well to tide us over during the months we can’t experience H.A.G.S. live.
The post-punk group’s greatest strength is in their songwriting, which comes as no surprise given that all four band members have a background in creative writing. Curiosity leads to inquiry, and H.A.G.S. lyrics aren’t shy about getting to the point: “Can’t we all be best friends now? A trio of pals? Why you gotta be so cold and cut me out?” But these songs look equally inward, reflecting on personal choices and agency within relationships, too. “Practice” ponders the limits of love and the patience required to realize it (“How long will it take? How long will I wait?”). Queer yearning in songs like “Theory” and “Teams” gives the album an emotional through-line: in “Theory,” the album’s opening track, the rhythmic shifts reflect the tumultuous push-pull of falling for someone, “ready or not.” The album’s deeper cuts are balanced with bop-along songs like “Monster” and “Teams” (their song “Cobalt” is, in the words of drummer Jess Richardson, the album’s “ballad between bangers”). And in “Practice,” Eve Chamely’s bouncy bass line provides a funky interlude that I can’t help but wiggle along to myself.
There is a big, sweet, bleeding heart at the centre of H.A.G.S., and Have A Good Summer, Jane, covers a lot of emotional terrain. The songs on this album swing from angsty and brooding to upbeat and spunky, and the balance leaves listeners with the same hopeful feeling you get as spring slowly gives way to summer. The tender playfulness of their live shows feature on this album, too — a sense that you are not just eavesdropping on, but part of, a jam session between friends. At the H.A.G.S. Peter Easton show, I stood at the back of a packed room, captivated by the catchiness of each song. Looking around at the crowd of people, I couldn’t spot a still body. Everyone was swaying, tapping, nodding, or otherwise moving along to every tune, a collective experience that feels so rare to find nowadays.
On the whole, this album is a fresh and spirited debut that holds all the potential of our shortest, sweetest season. The emotional thrust of these songs, paired with the playful musicality of H.A.G.S.’s four members, showcase the many shades of summer — stormy and confusing, sunny and hopeful, tender and hot with promise.
Katherine Abbass (she/her) is a queer writer of Lebanese descent. Her work has been nominated for two Alberta Literary Awards, an Alberta Magazine Award, and in 2021, she won Riddle Fence’s Fiction Contest. She is pursuing her MA at Memorial University of Newfoundland.