For Cameron “CJ” Simms, adolescence was not a phase to outgrow so much as a recording project requiring six years of revisions. Picture Day, the first full-length from the St. John’s project the fencesitters, gathers ten songs written during and about Simms’s teenage years. Released March 20, 2026, through friend’s house records, the album runs a compact 36:54, but its emotional clock stretches backwards: old arguments remain unsettled, bedrooms feel claustrophobic and escape is usually complicated by money, fear or family.
Simms began the fencesitters as a bedroom enterprise. The 2021 EP Aconitum, made for the RPM Challenge, was recorded largely with a MacBook microphone and a quarter-inch-to-USB cable. Picture Day retains that homemade candour while enlarging its architecture considerably. Recorded between January 2024 and March 2026, it passed through seven locations—including M.O.T.H Recordings, BAD TIMES CLUB, The Vera Project, a Boys & Girls Club, houses and Simms’s dorm—and involved 18 collaborators. The geography matters: rather than hiding its stop-start construction, the record turns accumulated rooms and friendships into part of its sound.
At its centre is brisk, emotionally overloaded guitar rock, sometimes carrying the raised-fist velocity of Japandroids or the awkward melodic charge of early Weezer. Yet the arrangements continually worry at that foundation. Toy piano, Mellotron, stylophone and chord organ share space with trumpet, French horn, saxophone, accordion, banjo, mandolin and cello. These are not prestige ornaments: their slightly mismatched colours suit songs that revisit teenage experience without pretending memory is orderly. Chris Cole supplies drums and co-production on several tracks; James Benoit engineered much of the live percussion, while Larry Crane mixed “Tell You” at Jackpot! Recording Studio.
Simms’s writing is strongest when it preserves an adolescent problem at its actual scale. “Flight Song” reduces online friendship and distance to the brutal fact that plane tickets cost too much. “Forbidden Confessions” circles the terror and confusion of coming out, while “These Times” renders home as a concrete dome stalked by alcohol and violence. On “Smoke Break,” a dwindling cigarette becomes a relationship, an injury and a measure of time. The language can be blunt, even ungainly, but refinement would defeat the point: these songs document thoughts before adulthood teaches them to disguise themselves.
That same mixture of sincerity and internet-native mischief produced a Windows horror game, Five Nights with CJ, created by collaborator Alec Loverchio as a Five Nights at Freddy’s tie-in for “Flight Song.” It is a telling extra: Picture Day belongs to a DIY culture where albums can generate games, focus groups and sprawling credit lists rather than a polished mythology.
Simms has already followed the album with September’s Filmstock Recull EP, a set of leftovers, alternate versions and transitional sketches. Still, Picture Day feels less like a cleared archive than a class photograph: crowded, imperfect and haunted by the knowledge that everyone in it has already changed.