Few things are more certain than death, and as hard as we might try to mask life’s harsh reality with the assumption of eternal youth, nothing can really prepare us for the numbing experience of loss.  “I was at home from tour and I got an early morning phone call,” says Static X bassist, Tony […]

Orville Peck Pony Royal Mountain/Sub Pop  Orville Peck is an enigma — and so is his debut album, Pony. With his delicately hollow voice, sans country twang, the mysterious masked singer—who keeps his identity and real name a secret—has crafted a record that sounds like a transplant from a Western movie, defying both time and […]

Duality has always been a facet of the overarching narrative of hip-hop. At its core, the music is woven together, with every rapper contributing a different part of the same anthology of stories. Every release adds to a sort of invisible balance that gives the audience a temperature check on the overall health of hip-hop […]

Formed out of a monthly, live, electronic jam dance party at Calgary’s Habitat Living Sound, BLVD NOIR blend jazz, downtempo, dub and psych explorations overtop chill house and techno grooves. It’s an unusual and feverish combination, accelerated by live improvisational touches, that seems to morph at the edges of your hearing, a synesthetic experience that […]

In many ways, Arcade Fire could be considered the first mature Internet band. They grew up together through the early days of web 2.0 when they debuted with Funeral in 2004 — and the Internet was coming into its own — positively blossomed alongside social media during the first half of this decade, and suffered […]

Cartel Madras Age of the Goonda EP Sub Pop  If 2019 was the Year of Yeehaw in indie music, the Calgary firestarting hip-hop duo, Cartel Madras, said fuck all that white noise and split the country’s music scene wide open with their relentless, radical, queer, female, Desi raps that just won’t quit. It’s a revolution […]

In 1996, Freddie Ross was a gay teenager graduating high school—the same year he first sang as a backup vocalist for his friend Katey Red, the prolific gay rapper from New Orleans’ Third Ward. Back then, Ross could not know that, twenty years later, Beyoncé—that Beyoncé—would be calling in hopes that Ross would record vocals […]

N0V3L NOVEL Flemish Eye N0V3L have made international waves with their debut, topping this year’s list in a psycho-post-punk fashion statement.  The album is just shy of 20 minutes but grows on the mind like a well-dressed fungus, so effortlessly re-listenable that the shorter run-length is hardly noticeable. The six-piece art collective capture a post-punk […]

1) Dave Psychodrama Neighbour The first time South London artist Dave toured Canada, he passed through Toronto with his counterpart AJ Tracey, both of whom were just starting to break out of the South London music scene. This fall, coming off the back of his Mercury Prize-winning debut album Psychodrama, playing to a sold-out audience […]

Rihanna began the decade with the vibrant and vivacious Loud (2010), her fifth album, and one that’s filled with the bright, fierce energy we’ve come to associate with its creator. Loud was a departure from its predecessor, Rated R, where Rihanna probed darker themes and found release through artistic self-expression. Yet the start of this […]