[4] He recruited his sister Molly along with a friend from college, Debra-Jean Creelman, to accompany his own vocals for the songs he had written, and the trio played as an acoustic act before adding drummer Kenton Loewen and bassist Jeremy Page.

This debut album was recorded with Howard Redekopp, who had also worked with the New Pornographers and Tegan and Sara.

When the Vancouver Province rated Mother as one of the top five BC bands to watch for in 2007, they began to receive acclaim for their debut album.

In the summer of 2006, they opened for the Australian band The Cat Empire at the sold-out Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

[5][6] In October 2006, after playing a set at the Pop Montreal festival, Mother met with Last Gang Records and later signed a four-album contract.

[8] The album prompted a reviewer at the Toronto Star to describe the band as "evolving into orchestral harmonies and hip hop-influenced power ballads, as if Adam Lambert had joined The Dirty Projectors".

On January 9, 2012, Kraft Foods launched a series of television commercials featuring the song "Bright Idea".

In 2014, the band signed with Universal Music Canada to produce their fifth album, Very Good Bad Thing, which was released on November 4, 2014.

[17] The band supported the album with the Dance and Cry tour, playing 26 shows across North America, starting on February 7, 2019, in Vancouver and ending March 16, 2019, in Buffalo, New York.

Starting in late 2020, songs from their 2008 album, O My Heart, went viral on the video-sharing platform TikTok, causing their music to reach new streaming highs.

The songs, in particular "Hayloft", "Arms Tonite", "Wrecking Ball" and "Burning Pile", became popular, with videos including cosplay and gothic fashion.

Lead vocalist, Ryan Guldemond, described the surge as a "high honor and huge compliment whenever it's suggested that our music might serve as an adequate soundtrack to a courageous journey of self-discovery that often rubs against societal norms".

Guldemond further reiterated that their early music "really struggled to fit neatly into the industry standards of either a rock or pop format [...] I sang straight from my throat and had a much more androgynous tone.

[1]Although the band had not planned on making new music, in October 2020, they stated to Rolling Stone that they were completing their eighth album at The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver.