London, ON-based folk artist Willem James Cowan shares “Back to the City,” a sparse and emotionally heavy folk single that captures the strange disorientation of returning to a place once tied to love, comfort, and identity after everything connected to it has changed. Anchored by little more than voice and acoustic guitar, the track transforms post-breakup displacement into something deeply intimate and quietly devastating.

Written after Willem moved back in with his parents following the end of a long-term relationship, “Back to the City” reflects on revisiting Toronto after years spent building a life there with a partner. What was once familiar suddenly felt cold, distant, and emotionally unrecognizable.

“This song is about the feeling you get when you return to a place that you called home for so long, but now feels completely foreign,” Willem explains. “I still remember the lingering anxiety and dread that would well up inside me as I drove past the apartment buildings that line the Gardiner Expressway.”

At its core, “Back to the City” explores how memory reshapes physical spaces. The comfort and warmth once associated with a city become buried beneath grief and emotional residue, transforming everyday landmarks into reminders of absence and change. “It’s amazing how the good memories and feelings you associate with a place can be completely smothered by the bad,” he says.

The recording process mirrors that emotional directness. After unsuccessfully attempting fuller arrangements, Willem ultimately returned to the simplest version of the song: one live off the floor take featuring only voice and acoustic guitar, alongside a handful of subtle guitar swells added afterward.

“I think the sparseness serves the song much more,” Willem shares. “‘Back to the City’ is about loneliness, loss, and discomfort, and I think that shines through with just a voice and acoustic guitar.”

The single closes Willem’s upcoming album, What Should Happen Next?, out at the end of summer 2026: a collection of songs centred around loss, growth, transition, and the uncertainty of moving forward. As the final track, it functions less like resolution and more like quiet acceptance, sitting with discomfort rather than trying to outrun it.

Toronto artist and producer ARK IDENTITY (Noah Mroueh) shares “Social Dopamine,” a gritty 90s-inspired alternative single that examines the addictive pull of online validation and the slow erosion of self that can come with it. Blending fuzzed-out indie rock textures with emotionally direct songwriting, the track captures the tension between who we are and the carefully curated versions of ourselves we project into the world.

Written about the constant search for approval through social media, “Social Dopamine” explores the strange cycle of external validation that has become second nature for so many. “We’ve all curated our personas online so heavily. We’ve become so consumed by how we’re perceived that we start to lose touch with who we actually are,” Noah explains. At the heart of the song is the fleeting rush that comes with attention, a momentary high that quickly disappears, only to be chased again.

“Social Dopamine” also marks the beginning of a larger chapter. The single serves as the title track to ARK IDENTITY’s upcoming EP, sitting at the centre of a new body of work that expands the sonic and emotional world Noah has been building.

The title itself gets to the core of that feeling. “It’s about that short-lived high we get from seeking attention and the approval of others,” Noah says. “It becomes addictive, a sort of ‘Social Dopamine’ hit that we keep chasing. But it never really satisfies anything deeper, so the cycle just keeps repeating.”

The songwriting process unfolded instinctively alongside co-writer Philippe Andre. Beginning with the lyrics, the pair built the track around emotional honesty rather than polish. “The lyrics came first, and then we tried to make something that felt honest, raw, and emotionally true to the words,” Noah explains.

Production-wise, ARK IDENTITY leaned into a distinctly 90s alternative palette, drawing influence from Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Beck. Dirty guitars, fuzzed-out bass, and imperfect drums give the song its worn-in, human edge. Rather than sanding away those rough corners, Noah embraced them. “We didn’t want it to feel overly polished,” he says. “The imperfections make it feel more human, which fits the message of the song.”

Experimental duo Allegories return with “Honestly, that’s enough honesty,” a buoyant yet introspective indie rock/shoegaze-leaning single that explores the fragile space between truth, performance, and self-deception. Built on shifting textures and genre-blurring arrangements, the track moves between dreamy catharsis and unpredictable emotional turns, embodying the duo’s long-standing fascination with unstable narratives and fractured perspective. It’s taken from Allegories’ upcoming new album, By accident, On purpose, set for release on October 16th, 2026.

At its core, the song questions the idea of authenticity itself. Written from the perspective of unreliable narrators, it reflects on how even our most “honest” expressions are shaped by distortion, memory, and self-mythology. “People often assume I’m a confessional songwriter,” Adam Bentley explains. “It’s not that elements aren’t drawn from my life, but the songs feel more like channeling characters and fragments of people I’ve observed.”

That tension between truth and invention becomes the emotional engine of the track. Rather than presenting clarity, it leans into contradiction: the idea that deception isn’t just unavoidable, but foundational to how we move through the world. “We’re all deceiving each other in the way we perform in public, and probably deceiving ourselves in private too,” they add. “Otherwise, how the hell would we keep living?”

Sonically, “Honestly, that’s enough honesty” continues Allegories’ tradition of genre mutation. Indie rock structures dissolve into shoegaze haze, buoyant melodic moments drift into unstable abstraction, and familiar forms are constantly recontextualized. The result is a track that feels both immediate and unsettled, grounding itself in hooks while resisting fixed interpretation.

The song also sits naturally within the duo’s broader creative framework for their upcoming record, where each track emerges from layered processes of transformation, rewriting, and reconstruction. What begins as something simple is continually reshaped until it becomes something entirely unanticipated, yet instinctively correct.

“Honestly, that’s enough honesty” ultimately embraces contradiction rather than resolving it. It suggests that truth is not a fixed point, but something constantly refracted through performance, memory, and imagination.

Each Allegories record emerges through improvisation, trial and error, and a relentless pursuit of discovery. Within that exploration, however, are guiding lights. Their first record, Surreal Auteur (2008), began as a commission for a noise tape, though the early improvisations naturally drifted toward pop structures. The sounds of ‘60s pop, Motown and The Beach Boys in particular, became foundational references. Their next record, Endless, was inspired by forward-thinking electronic musicians with one foot in the club. House music formed its DNA, though abstraction continuously bubbled to the surface.

Their newest record, By accident, On purpose (October 16, 2026), began with every song written on ukulele, almost as a dare, choosing the instrument least associated with electronic music. From there, those skeletal foundations were gradually erased beneath Jordan Mitchell’s eclectic arrangements until the songs transformed into entirely new forms. Adam Bentley then wrote a second song overtop of the evolving structures, before both versions, vocals, melodies, and arrangements, were fused together into something new. Through that process, more organic and traditional rock elements re-emerged. Guitars, absent from Endless (2022), crept back in alongside live drums and bass. Shoegaze textures surfaced, and traces of Mitchell and Bentley’s decade spent together in indie rock band The Rest began to cut through the electronic experimentation.

Past releases have drawn attention from Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Needle Drop, CBC, and more, alongside live appearances with BADBADNOTGOOD, Future Islands, and Yo La Tengo.

Composer and creator Ken Lovern joins us for a conversation about the new music video for “Boone Plays It Back.” We’ll talk about the process of bringing the music to life in a visual form, and how performance, character, and storytelling come together through sound and imagery.

We’ll also explore the musical approach behind the piece, including Boone’s extraordinary ability to instantly hear, replicate, and transform complex piano works, and how that virtuosity is reflected in the arrangement and performance.

The track features vocals from Madisen Ward, an operatic performance from Alyson Cambridge, drums by Lester Estelle Jr., and trumpet by Stanton Kessler, along with Lovern’s own work on organ, piano, and additional instrumentation, creating a layered, cinematic sound that drives the piece forward.

1.

Tell us the story of this track. Why did you choose to visualize it specifically in this way?

This track, Boone Plays it Back, is the first single from “Blind Boone the Musical”. 

Blind Boone the Musical is an historical musical fantasy about the life of Missouri’s ragtime pioneer, John William “Blind” Boone — a man who struggled against and overcame racism as one of the first African American concert performers.

The setting of this track is that The Blind Boone Concert Company has just rolled into town and Boone’s manager, John Lange Jr., is in front of the town’s new opera house.  

He is hyping the performance, saying “Boone Plays it Back!”

Boone’s remarkable ability to play back what other pianists have just played is a great asset when Lange is trying to convince people to attend a concert. 

One of their most successful performance techniques was to ask any audience member to play a piece and then Boone would play it back, usually with more fluidity and musicality, often adding variations or embellishments.  

This tune captures the excitement, confidence, and swagger of a professional promoter who believes in what he is promoting. 

2. What was the inspiration behind this new video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?

In order to tell the story of Blind Boone more completely, the release is accompanied by a comic book.  

In this video, I use the comic book art extensively to visually tell the story along with the music.  

I also used some vintage photos of Boone and some of Boone’s promotional materials.  

There is also a vintage image of a tornado.  

The Tornado reference “He’ll make a tornado come out from the keys” refers to one of Boone’s most popular compositions where he imitated a tornado on the piano.  

The inspiration was a tornado that had devastated Marshfield, Missouri in 1880, killing an estimated 100 people.  

Reportedly, when Boone first played this piece in Marshfield, the audience members became convinced that there was an actual tornado occurring and started to seek shelter until they were assured it was only the re-creation on the piano.

The only contemporary image is of amazingly accomplished opera singer Alyson Cambridge who sings the part of an up tight local arts enthusiast who is skeptical of allowing an African American performer to play the piano in the town’s new opera house.  But she is won over when she learns that Boone can play the classics by Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann.  

Alyson has performed for over two decades on the world’s leading opera and concert stages – The Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, London’s Royal Albert Hall, among others.  

3. What was the process of making the video?

This was a very “do it yourself” video production.  I took images of the comic book and the vintage flyers and imported them into iMovie and used iMovie to create the video.The comic book adaptation of the story was made by The Gutter Studios, Constanza Osuna, Julia Diaz, and Katie Blancha.So, while I hired the comic book artists, I did the video myself.  

Ontario duo YASSiN & Sean Terrio return with “DON’T DO THAT,” an upbeat and emotionally charged alternative pop-rock single about confronting old habits, creative exhaustion, and the difficult process of becoming a better version of yourself. Driven by full-bodied production, soaring energy, and deeply personal lyricism, the track captures the moment where frustration turns into determination.

At its core, “DON’T DO THAT” reflects the emotional weight both artists experienced following the release of their debut album, 2024’s Just Try. “The song was inspired by the state of mind we both felt like we were in last year after releasing our first album,” they explain. “We struggled getting our creative flow back again. Although the song is upbeat, it may be one of the most personal songs to show how heavy music has felt for us over the last little while.”

1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically?
   1. Lyrically there’s an underdog feeling to the story; someone living a certain way for so long, thinking they don’t have what it takes to achieve their dreams, but then taking a leap of faith despite that fact. It’s as if the character has come up with these chorus lyrics to remind themselves to keep going, because we all need a reminder to keep on track. As to why we chose to create a visual for this song; once we finished the track, it became clear that it was going to be a single, and a high-energy one at that. We wanted to build off that energy and, almost creating that reminder to ourselves, further cement this tune as a moment where we wanted to push forward and not fall back. Now that it’s out there, we want to live up to the positivity and energy of this track, in our own lives.

2. What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)?
   1. We knew we wanted to recreate iconic movie scenes early in the storyboarding process. These are movies that almost everyone has seen, so it would be clear what’s happening on the screen, but it was also a lot of fun for us to try our best to get close to the original article. I think the dream of being in a movie is common, amongst all sorts of people. Much like following your favourite sports team as a kid, its an early-life exposition to “wanting to be something/someone”. Now, not that everyone retains that dream or goes into acting, it feels like at one point in time, almost everyone wanted to be the character of their favourite movie. 

3. What was the process of making this video?
   1. Well, it started with a dream… LOL! But it did and with the help of some wonderful people from our community, people who believe deeply in creating something fun, and some perseverance from our end, we were able to score an amazing location in Film.ca. We cannot thank Jeff, Charlotte and Jason enough. Their contribution and involvement in this video, but more importantly within the community over decades, truly speaks to what the song, our music in general, and creating “things” is all about. Logistically speaking, it took a lot of pre-planning, coordination, late nights and early mornings, amazing family and friends, our life savings, and the willingness to give it a shot, even if we look like fools.

Calgary, AB art duo HAIR CONTROL (Ryan Bourne & Rebecca Reid) share “TV in the Afterlife,” an anthemic synth-pop workout jam that transcends both the celebratory and the existential. Ebullient art pop with dream-drenched ‘80s-inspired textures, the track transforms apocalypse anxiety and digital-era disconnection into a strangely uplifting, physically charged release.

Originally written by Ryan as a three-chord guitar sketch with a post-punk edge, the song first appeared in earlier form on his Plant City record. Revisited through HAIR CONTROL’s lens, it evolved into an ‘80s-leaning synth pop piece with Rebecca stepping in on lead vocals, reshaping it into what the duo affectionately dubs their “existential workout jams.”

1. Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically? 

RYAN: “TV in the Afterlife” is a kind of sensual satire set to synth pop. I was messing around with three-chord pop feels on guitar, and the melody felt really ‘80s, so the synth hooks took ‘80s baroque pop and dream pop cues, and the lyric took shape as a kind of metaphysical dystopian daydream. I initially released it as a postpunk garage jam on my 2023 “Plant City” record, though the instrumental of HAIR CONTROL’s version was recorded first. The melody begged to be re-imagined as ‘80s synth pop with Rebecca on lead vocals, so it became one of the first in a song cycle we’ve come to affectionately dub our “existential workout jams”.  The lyric muses on waning attention spans, apocalypse anxiety, engineered isolation, the vacuum of egoic consumer culture, the threat of technofascism, the consolation – as well as the existential horror – of  “never being alone”. But there’s a defiant exuberance to it too, it’s ultimately meant to be fun, and a little funny – as well as celebratory, and the lyrics as well as the track itself are a kind of visually evocative stream of consciousness sequence, which easily lent itself to visualization as a music video.

2. What was the inspiration behind this video (visuals, storyline, etc.)? 

REBECCA: While browsing Marketplace, we found an MCM TV that felt perfect, so we followed the impulse. It became the starting point. The first footage we shot was the TV cycling through different static patterns in the middle of a patch of lilac bushes.

I experimented with 80s-inspired looks for the lip sync components, which naturally influenced parts of the color palette. Ryan got into making short stop-motion animations with whatever objects around the house felt right. Building environments and sets together is already part of our shared visual art practice, so handmade pieces and collected props gradually worked their way into different vignettes, like the giant red glitter lips striding across the screen or the hand-painted spiral rolling across the horizon. 

The narrative evolved as a stream of consciousness, guided more by the movement and pacing of the song than a fixed storyline. Some images, however, have a more direct lineage. For the lyric “renaissance hermaphrodite”, we pulled in photographs I made last fall at the Louvre of the life-size Roman marble sculpture Sleeping Hermaphroditus, which lies on a carved marble mattress added at the end of the Renaissance period. It felt like an apt visual anchor for that moment.

As we got closer to the final edit, we realized it needed one more burst of motion. Ryan had previously scouted a blue wall along the Transcanada, near where we live, so we stopped there before our Sled Island set in-between rain showers and caught what we needed. I improvised a few passes of a mock cheerleading routine while Ryan filmed, carefully framing each shot without backing into traffic on the busy road just behind him. It was one of those last-minute ideas that ended up feeling essential to the finished video.

3. What was the process of making this video?

REBECCA: The process was driven almost entirely by intuition with only a few moments unfolding according to a clear or precise plan. We’d stumble across an image that seemed to connect to a lyric or just landed as a kind of psychic hit, then we’d film it. It felt more like gathering material than executing a plan.

For the “Sweet and Sticky” sequence, we saw a hand with brightly painted nails holding a melting ice cream cone. We scouted a few locations and waited for a hot day. Once we settled on ice cream colour, we drove over and filmed it melting in my hand. Our backup plan was an off-camera hair dryer, but the weather did the work for us.

A lot of the image-making followed the same DIY logic: we like that, it feels right, now how do we make it do what we want or compose it till it feels right. Found footage became part of the process too: mining archival footage and clips from our own collection that suddenly felt like they belonged, folding them into the project wherever they clicked.

This is a way of working we often return to when we’re making videos for ourselves: run-and-gun, intuitive, and open to whatever happens in the moment with a loose vision that feels palpable or precise in a certain detail and following that to see where it leads. When we’re creating work for someone else, we’re much more structured, with detailed shot lists and tighter planning. Personal projects give us permission to experiment, follow instinct, and make decisions as we go. That freedom naturally shapes the DIY aesthetic that runs through a lot of our visual collaborative work.