When celebrated UK art-rockers Wild Beasts called it a day in February 2018, it didn’t signal an end to the music, but instead a new beginning. After 16 years, five acclaimed full-lengths (including 2009’s Mercury Prize-nominated Two Dancers), and a farewell live album, the four members of Wild Beasts parted on good terms and went […]

Brandon Williams has an ambivalent relationship to his hometown in southern Ontario. It serves as both the inspiration behind his music, and place that’s a subject to criticism. “The finance minister under Stephen Harper, Jim Flaherty, lived 300 metres away from me,” Williams says from an airy loft in Toronto’s Junction, where he’s been working […]

Vulnerability through artistic practice is largely about opening up spaces: within the artist to explore difficult or repressed emotions, and within the audience to move through the work with empathy and openness. The best works that arise from opening up have the capacity to challange the type of harmful narratives that have historically made sensitivity […]

Curled up on the couch in their living room, Tonye Aganaba is gushing over Star Trek. The multidisciplinary artist insists the sci-fi series was ahead of its time in terms of social progressiveness: it had African American women in visible and authoritative roles; it was one of the first to air an interracial kiss; an […]

When most Western audiences think of music from Africa, two artists usually come to mind: Nigerian rebel Afrobeat singer and composer Fela Kuti, and Ghanaian Juju guitarist King Sunny Ade. While these artists are easily among the most recognizable (and iconic) artists to emerge from Africa, they represent only a small fraction of the musical […]

“She is the mother I never had. She is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves.” That now-memed quote comes from none other than Oprah, talking about her idol Barbara Walters, but it may as well be about Lizzo. We were blessed enough to catch the “Juice”-y singer on the […]

There’s a new band in Calgary marching to the beat of their own drum machine. Splintering off from lush dream pop luminaries, Lashes, Khyla Floen and Katie Hillson shed their analog instruments for a stack of synths and a darker New Wave sound, complete with full 80s regalia. Khillah Khills prowl Calgary like a glammed […]

Edmonton folk musician Ian St. Arnauds’ life changed suddenly when his North Of Here bandmate, Luke Janzen, tragically passed away following a collision with a train in the fall of 2017. Rising from the ashes of grief alongside his friend and other bandmate, Will Holowaychuk, the pair united to form St. Arnaud and are now […]