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 […]

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 […]