Jason Couse and Wes Marskell — together, The Darcys — are King’s alumni turned rockstars. They got their start playing covers in The Wardroom for free beer in 2006, and have since put out six studio albums, toured across North America and received nominations for the Juno Awards and the Polaris Prize. On Sept. 4, 2025, they returned to Halifax to revisit their roots and play an intimate show at The Basement of The Shoe.
“Playing in Halifax again is definitely a full circle moment,” said Marskell. “It’s a bit of a homecoming.”
Best friends since they were ten years old, the duo always held aspirations of starting a band, but it wasn’t until they became students in the Contemporary Studies Program at King’s that their dream came to fruition.
“We thought if we started a band in university, we would get free beer, we’d get girls and it would just be the best time of our lives,” said Couse. “There was a lot of free beer, but not a lot of girls, to be honest.”
The Darcys took their name from Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, the “first cool, suave character” they encountered in their English literature course at Dalhousie, according to Marskell. They played their first ever show at the Grad House, the former Dalhousie campus pub, before going on to play The Wardroom, The Marquee and other Halifax venues.
“Our first show, I think it went well,” said Couse. “We played for free beer, and our bass player at the time got really drunk, so he kind of had to be propped up against the wall.”
“I think there were matching tracksuits involved,” said Marskell, laughing. “I remember being really, really nervous. It’s a whole different experience, playing for 50 people that you know than it is playing for a crowd of thousands.”
The Darcys’ return to Halifax brings back the intimate dynamic of their early shows. Couse and Marskell address the crowd with a conversational rapport that feels less like stage banter and more like a genuine back-and-forth between friends. They discuss whether they should leave the stage and wait for the audience to call them back out or just play their encore now and even tell stories of waking up on Argyle Street after a night of 50 cent vodka shots at The Dome.
The duo are in constant motion on stage. Couse, on guitar, leaps and roams around the stage, while Marskell plays the drums with his entire body. At times they play directly to each other, grinning as each tries to play louder than the other.
Marskell says this “raw, pure, almost adolescent energy” was the spark for their most recent record, Rendering Feelings, which they released independently in 2024.
“Rendering Feelings really was a return to that time in our lives,” said Marskell. “We wanted to remind ourselves why we first got hooked on making music together.”
Looking back on how far they have come, Marskell claims that the secret to The Darcys’ success is “a healthy amount of delusion.”
“You have to have big dreams and be delusional,” said Couse. “Not to get manifestational, but you have to dream as big as you can if you want to get big.”
“And you have to enjoy what you’re doing,” said Marskell. “We have so much fun. So much fucking fun.”
