Yellowknife’s Shea Alain was reunited with former band Reuben and the Dark in a sold-out show to close 2024’s Snowkings’ Winter Festival.
In a night that ranked among the greatest closing-night shows in almost three decades of the city’s Snowcastle, the band played an intimate and faultless set despite barely any time to prepare.
Yellowknife’s Grace Clark and a full band opened the final evening before the Snowcastle is shut down and allowed to melt away. Next year, billed Snowking XXX, will be the festival’s 30th anniversary.


Alain and two other Yellowknifers, Andrew Ball and Mike Auty, had just hours to prep their headline set with frontman Reuben Bullock and bandmates Ben Longman and Sam Harrison, who were fresh from a show in Lac La Biche, Alberta.
Bullock said Friday’s show, inside the ice-and-snow walls of the Snowcastle’s hall on the frozen Yellowknife Bay, was “near the top” of the list of unusual gigs his band has played.
“It’s a really special night for us,” he told the crowd.
Alain told Cabin Radio the show delivered “a beautiful audience and a beautiful night, and I had a whole lot of fun.”
He left Reuben and the Dark in 2019, after nearly a decade with the band, and has since started a family alongside a musical project of his own.


The audience sang a cappella to Friday’s penultimate track, Hold Me Like a Fire, before Bullock and bandmates entered the round and played an acoustic encore surrounded by fans.
Earlier, drummer Ball ended up learning one song by having Bullock deliver instructions live on-stage as they were playing it.
“I felt like I was acting up there tonight, like I got to be different versions of other drummers that I’ve seen. It was really fun,” Ball said.
Alain said Bullock and co got off the plane in Yellowknife at 11:30am and began rehearsing with Alain, Ball and Auty at 1pm.
“There are a lot of times where a show under those conditions could really fall apart easily,” said Alain.
“The fact that it didn’t was great. It’s easy to have upbeat songs and people be into it, but when you cut to Reuben playing solo or the other, slower songs, and people are being equally quiet, it’s hard to get an audience like that. For us, it was a major success in that sense.”

The band sold special shirts after the show that display the words “Reuben and the Dark” alongside a polar bear not a million miles removed from the GNWT logo.
Bullock said in the band’s earlier days, with Alain on board, they had toured Canada’s smaller towns “and nobody would show up except for 20 people from Yellowknife.”
“I’m not even joking, 20 people minimum, every small town and city from coast to coast of Canada in the first years of us touring. There was always this, like, anchor here, and always this feeling of support,” he said.
Alain said there are aspects of being in that touring band that he doesn’t miss – the day-to-day grind of moving the show across Canada’s vast geography being one.
More: Stage dives, daunting drives – a decade with Reuben and the Dark
“But the moments when you get on stage and we have an audience like how it was tonight? I mean, there’s no way you couldn’t miss that,” he said.
“You could do a whole tour and get one or two shows like this.
“It’s nice that this is the one show I’ve played with Reuben in five years and it was great. It’s great to be like, ‘Alright, we still got it.'”







