“Brilliantly balanced between dream pop, new-wave, and post-punk, Toronto quintet Hollow Graves just might be our newest obsession,” declares kid with a vinyl.
Hollow Graves’ dreamy lofi album Mid-Century Modern (Jan 21) was inspired by life events before and during the pandemic. Songs touch on the loneliness of being secluded, relationship and personal struggles, while also offering glimpses of hope and enjoyment.
“Borderline”is a story about a person whose personal struggles are being spread to friends and family in a negative way. The band expands, “even though you may try to help a struggling friend, you might not be able to affect positive change until they can help themselves first.”
Toronto punk-rock quartet Sham Family’s eponymous debut EP is slated for release on Friday January 21st and marks the first outside release on Born Ruffians’ intriguing Wavy Haze Records. The four tracks are a handful of “hundreds and hundreds” of demos that lived long enough to pass as Sham Family songs worthy of inclusion.
This project has always kind of been my baby that I was always working on because I always needed to be working on some sort of music when I wasn’t working in other bands, and it’s gone through so many stages of its life. It started as just a four-track cassette-recorder wall-of-noise shoegaze project. Then it was gonna be this industrial-noise side-project thing that I just could not wait to unleash upon the world. – frontman Kory Ross
The EP’s latest single, “Plaque Protection,” was written about corporations exploiting certain communities for personal gain – to market themselves with symbols of allyship while running business practices and standards that discriminate against those same communities.
Toronto-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist SHEAL has found something worth saying with her sophomore LP Courage Again (out now). Writing the album over the span of several years with the constraints of being a mother and teacher, and recording most of it at eight-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child, Courage Again is deeply reflective of love, fear and motherhood.
Courage Again is about how love makes your inner and outer world expand and how fear makes your inner and outer world contract. It’s about my experience and learnings around pushing through fear rather than running away from it, hence the title of the album. – SHEAL
The album’s newest single, “Noa’s Song,” was inspired by the birth of SHEAL’s niece and completed after the birth of her first daughter. Dedicated to all of her siblings’ children, the lyrics are about literally pushing through pain and fear while also metaphorically relating to the themes of love and fear that weave through Courage Again.
Mear is an indie pop collaboration between singer-songwriter Frances Miller and electronic composer Greg Harrison. Together, their music combines catchy melodies and poignant lyrics with their shared love of experimental music. Miller and Harrison met while working at the music venue Massey Hall in Toronto and began collaborating shortly thereafter by sending tracks back and forth over social media.
“The Order” is a redemptive new single from their first full-length album, Soft Chains, slated for release on April 21st. Miller details her early experiences living with a chronic illness and grieving the loss of her health.
Miller reveals, “in 2014, I lost the ability to do a lot of things I had previously taken for granted. At the time I wrote this I couldn’t read for more than a few minutes at a time and a short walk around the block could leave me bedridden the next day. ‘The Order’ was an attempt to voice some of the pain and the loneliness of that; of not understanding what was happening to me.”
Emily Merrell’s lush pop is based in her deep love and passion for music, where she has found solace and safety due to her tumultuous childhood. Her music is dreamy and ethereal, creating a light feeling in her listeners by way of her angelic sounds. She’s been working on her third studio album, The Hallowed Wide, a 12 song album of songs about human connection and the messiness that comes with it. She will release a new song a month until the release of the album later this year. She’s already released 2.
Her third release, “Quicksand,” which as a style and sound of if Madonna were to sing a song for The Little Mermaid, is the final piece of the “descent” into The Hallowed Wide, the name she gave the space between our current selves and the versions of ourselves we’re trying to grow into. The piano sounds of angelic bubbles and give a feeling of flight, while the lyrics speak on the mystery of a new connection. It speaks to harness up our fear with an equal measure of exhilaration and now-or-never-ness and fly blind into brand new terrain.
“I love the way Joni Mitchell captures this feeling in her incredible song ‘I Don’t Know Where I Stand,’ says Emily. “The uneasiness is palpable. I imagine ‘Quicksand’ as a less measured iteration of this feeling. Will you emerge as the protagonist of this story? Or will you discover yourself merely a minor plot-propeller for the hero? You don’t know, and you don’t care. The intrigue is worth everything. You’ll eagerly assume the risk for the exquisite tension of this single moment. There’s hardly a more alluring feeling in the entirety of the human experience.”
Listen to “Quicksand”
Emily shares this on her upcoming album: “This project offers a heightened plane on which to explore the unknowable spaces between ourselves and others. Together, we examine sources of disconnect, and commit to braving these weighty expanses. We tease out the expectations, judgements, and selfishness that prevent us from connecting wholly. We learn to see beauty and magic in our fellow beings. And finally, we summon the courage to stretch our hands and hearts across the divide in trust.”
Malcolm Burn is a Grammy Award winning record producer, best known for having worked with Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, and The Tragically Hip among many others. In his other artistic life, he is a songwriter, singer and a recording artist.
Love, loss and the fragility of the human psyche are explored in his new solo album, the silence in your head, with the title track displaying a deep understanding of the fleeting aspects of time and human existence. Listen to the album in full here, a culmination of almost two decades worth of songwriting by Malcolm that incorporates an array of influences both new and old.
Modern Mystery 
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