For Richie Felix Alexander and Katherine Marie Kovna, the choice to pull up stakes and cross the Strait of Georgia was an easy one. As with most decisions that involve leaving Vancouver, rental rates played a major role. When Alexander and Kovna were looking for a home for their tech startup, Blue Panda Digital, Victoria’s appeal quickly became evident.

“We were able to get a three-storey space for the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver,” Alexander reveals when the Straight calls him in the Garden City. “So, yeah, that was pretty hard to turn down.”

The move has worked out in the couple’s favour on a creative level as well. The two are musicians, and relocating meant reestablishing their band, Did You Die, in a new city with new bandmates. (For the record, Did You Die features both Alexander and Kovna on guitar and vocals, with Roz Jeffery on bass and Matt Morin on drums.)

“It feels like we have two hometowns,” Alexander says. “Victoria has definitely embraced us even more so than Vancouver has, or maybe they embraced us a little faster. We’ve made a lot of friends here. Our last two shows sold out, so we love it. Playing Vancouver is awesome. We’re not there all the time, so we can’t play it as often as local bands can, so it’s a treat for us and our friends and whoever else comes out.”

Did You Die will return to the mainland this week to celebrate the release of its new LP, Royal Unicorn. A surging storm of ’90s-era shoegaze and grunge, the record is as relentlessly tuneful as it is unapologetically noisy. It turns out, however, that we almost ended up hearing a very different record. Things changed when Alexander juxtaposed an earlier version of Royal Unicorn with work by one of his favourite bands.

“I listened to it, and then I listened to a Swervedriver album from 1991, and I felt that the Did You Die stuff just wasn’t up to snuff,” he admits. “So in March/April, Felix Fung came down here to Victoria and turned my house into a recording studio. A lot of the bands—like Garrett [McClure] from Scars & Scarves and Jonathan [Amor] from Mystery Lover—they all loaned us a bunch of cool vintage gear and we retracked all the guitars and a bunch of the vocals.”

The result is one of the best shoegaze records to ever come out of Canada’s West Coast. That’s not damning with faint praise; it really is a good album, although admittedly once you get past Mystery Machine and maybe Red Vienna, there haven’t been that many shoegazing acts around these parts to begin with.

Indeed, Alexander, who had previously played in heavier bands with names like Angry, got some puzzled looks when he announced his intention to start a band like Did You Die, one that would blend dreamy atmospherics, buzz-saw postpunk, and head-drilling psych rock.

“People thought I was crazy when I started the band because I knew there was a shoegaze scene going on in Vancouver, but I guess the people that I knew were like, ‘What is this? You’re crazy. No one’s going to like this. You’ll be playing to nobody forever.’ ”

Alexander traces his musical evolution back to his discovery of Nirvana at the tender age of 12. A few years later, he landed every alt-rock kid’s dream gig.

“In my last year of high school, I had an internship at Sonic Unyon Records,” he recalls. “So, hanging out with the Tristan Psionic guys, who were big into My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth, and meeting all those bands through them—they signed bands like Treble Charger before anyone knew who they were. Hanging out with people like that in high school, working those events and listening to those guys… Those guys would throw so many records at me.”

It wasn’t just his musical tastes that took shape during that time. His days at Sonic Unyon instilled in Alexander a strong DIY spirit. He’s releasing Royal Unicorn on his own label, Blew//Rose. “We’re doing it old-school,” he says. “We’re doing our own college-radio tracking, we’re dealing with stores ourselves. Wherever the tour is going we’re making sure they have records there.”

If that sounds like a lot of work, you can be sure that Alexander is more than happy to do it. He’s justifiably proud of Royal Unicorn, describing it as the best music Did You Die has created to date.

“I think that the band has a legit­imate chance now with this recording,” he says.

Did You Die plays an album-release party for Royal Unicorn at SBC Restaurant on Friday (October 19).