Perhaps the most obvious reason for Idles’ importance in the current punk rock landscape can be found in the title of their most recent album, Joy As An Act of Resistance (2018). The highly touted album is a 12-track monster that fuses the moody dissonance of post-punk with the fury and energy of hardcore, and […]

At some point in the late 20th century, there was a shift in concert culture as shows across the board became less about performing songs and more about producing spectacles. Multi-million dollar budgets, pyrotechnics, hydraulics, special effects, LEDs, flying cars and whatever else you can imagine are just a regular part of artists’ stage shows […]

In the summer of 2012, Skrillex organized the Full Flex Express tour, which saw him and other artists travel across Canada by train and play shows in multiple cities. Inspired by a similar 1970 train tour featuring rock heavyweights Janis Jopin, the Grateful Dead, and the Band  — which ended up being a complete financial […]

February 2020 will mark the eight-year anniversary of a life-altering moment for Rena Kozak: her boyfriend, Chris Reimer (guitarist for seminal Calgary post-punk/no-wave band, Women), passed away unexpectedly in his sleep and she woke up to a world tinged black with grief and loss. That trauma split her life into two distinct phases, before and […]

Most artists could be said to fall into one of three categories: representing the time they are in, being highly influential to it, and standing outside of it. Kanye West has managed, over the course of the 2010s, to be all three. His rise and fall from grace embody much of the collective highs and […]

Technological changes hit the music industry hard in the 2010s. Pop artists repackaged themselves to suit marketing campaigns in hopes that it would keep album sales from tanking further. And then there was Adele. While others focused on creating constant content to satisfy the ticking time bomb of pop culture relevance, the North London singer-songwriter […]

Elisa Thorn has spent the last seven years waking up to a tall, spindly tree with coin-shaped leaves outside the window of her house in East Vancouver. Only recently it inspired her song, “Murmur and Hum.”  As one of a series of live video releases, The Other Side: Live at Afterlife, is a visual EP […]

December 14, 2019 The Velvet Underground After hitting the road with cool country sensation Orville Peck, making waves as the charismatic masked crooner’s backing band, Frigs made their return to Toronto this past weekend. Taking the stage as headliners, the Polaris Music Prize 2018 Long List post-punks showed everyone why they’re a notable act in […]

When Frank Ocean’s heartfelt letter surfaced on Tumblr in 2012, the mainstream media’s expectations for a black queer revolution were heavily misguided. The act of saying “I’m gay” for any black person is packed with nuance and an inherent fear that looms within our history and cultural norms. Some of the hardest lessons and personal […]

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 […]