Keeping a band active in a city with a music scene as unstable as Calgary’s is enough to drive any musician into early retirement, but for experimental new-wave throwbacks Mannequin Depressives, 10 years in this town is just scratching the surface. Convening in 1998 under singer Rod C. Dornian, the band emerged in the industrial-goth atmosphere of the Warehouse in the late ’90s, but their undeniably pop melodies and challenging ambient noise experiments set them apart from some of the more hardcore ’80s devotees, giving them the opportunity to expand their audience to anyone with an open mind.

Dornian and bandmates Scott Johns, Russ Magee and W. Jared Brookes (a.k.a. Nebulous) have bared witness as a band to the many trends and shifts that have shaped the music community over the last decade, both locally and at large. They say they’ve seen a progressive shift in the city’s music scene away from segregated groups based on taste or genre in favour of a more all-encompassing, group-hug approach to local music, one that Dornian says is ideal for a Mannequin Depressives comeback.

“When we started Mannequin Depressives it was at a different point when downloading was just sort of starting up, and now we’ve got a whole generation of kids that have graduated high school and are in the workforce that grew up downloading stuff. So now it’s really cool, because now you’ve got this whole generation that are into the widest variety of stuff.”

Hoping to further bridge the gap between the industrial scene that birthed them and the rock ’n’ roll crowd from which they draw influence, the band has organized a show to celebrate the release of their first full-length album in six years, and second overall, Girls Are Evil, that will feature both purely electronic and purely rock acts on the same bill, appropriately slated for both the Warehouse and The Underground, two venues that share the same building but until now have remained separate because of their opposing music preferences.

“There’s no question that we’re inspired by not just classic electro, but The Stooges, prog-rock from the ’70s, Queen — a whole bunch of classic bands,” Brookes explains. “We like Kraftwerk a lot, but it doesn’t have to all be part of (electronic) culture.”

“I just liked the idea of, as much as possible, realizing that we’re all on the same team, we’re all trying to get something new and exciting out there,” Dornian adds. “We’re all anti-mainstream. We’re all fighting the same battle.”

Over 10 years, the four-piece has been slow and precise in their endeavours, painstakingly writing, recording, producing and mastering both Girls Are Evil and their 2002 debut, Trash-Eighty. They’ve also had to juggle the hectic schedules of each of the individual members (school and marriage being the most prevalent time-consumers), but at the end of the day, they are dedicated, nay, determined to keep moving forward.

“I think we all had points somewhere along the line thinking maybe this isn’t a good idea, and maybe we should look for something else, or you know, step back from it, or we don’t really have the time. I think it’s really important that we didn’t, and I think that’s one thing that’s important to all the other bands out there, is to just not stop. Because that’s the thing that will give this city some kind of life — bands that don’t quit, even if they have trouble.”