Category: Music

I feel seen when listening to the gift that is American punk/alt band Mannequin Pussy. Their entire discography is a progression of artistic and musical truth, with each release becoming more unflinchingly personal and exquisitely composed than the last—but their 2024 album I Got Heaven is my personal favorite.

I've been listening a lot to Sally Shapiro's recent album Ready to Live a Lie.

Coffee shop writers amaze me. I fear I’m too distractible to concentrate in a setting with clinking spoons, bursts of laughter, a growling espresso machine, and chair legs scraping the floor. Give me silence.

If The Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division eloped to Turkey, She Past Away would be their lovechild. For those of us who came of age in Montreal’s dimly lit sanctuaries like Passeport and Saphir, this band is muscle memory, equal parts black eyeliner and existential dread, and it brings us back to nights under red lights, wrapped in fog, where the bassline thrummed like a pulse beneath the skin, and the dance floor was the only place we belonged. Those nights are long behind me now, but hearing She Past Away’s post-punk sounds in my father tongue feels like a homecoming.

If you haven’t discovered Matador yet, then it’s time. Lori Yates is an artist (singer and songwriter) who hales from Oshawa-Toronto-Nashville-Hamilton and recently Toronto again. According to her website, she is a “pioneer of Alternative-Country.” And Matador, her much-anticipated new release, is replete with songs reflecting on a life of experiences -- love, friendship, struggle, survival and mortality.