Formed in 2019 from lead singer/songwriter Angus Watt‘s desire to provoke more dancing within the Victoria, B.C. indie music community, Pastel Blank carries on the torch of such genre-defying luminaries as Talking Heads and Women. Kaleidoscopic guitarwork blends together jagged jabs of funk, soft shades of bossa-nova, and punchy disco beats to create a listening experience that flows between the grooves of indie rock, prog-pop, and new wave.

Produced by longtime band member and musical polymath Connor Head, “Dopamine” is the second single from Pastel Blank‘s forthcoming debut album. One of Watt‘s desires for the recording in-studio was for the single to express the excitement and playfulness of the soon-to-be infamous Pastel Blank live show. “Dopamine” is about the moment when you realize you’ve been flipping between apps like you’re checking an empty fridge for the 10th time, hoping to feed your receptors something that feels as good as the younger days of however long ago you picked up your phone.

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

“Dopamine is about screen addiction and the most mindless forms of doom-scrolling. I’ve spent more time than I care to admit watching the most inane bottom of the barrel content, like a split-screen edit of a podcast excerpt paired with Subway Surfer (or Temple Run for the old-heads). It’s funny to think that low effort, hyper-stimulating content can release some of the same chemicals you experience when you’re in love – there couldn’t be two more different experiences!

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

For the video, I wanted a phones-eye view of someone deep in a doomscroll, like a drawn out version of that split second when your screen goes black and all you can see is your reflection behind a bunch of grubby fingerprints. I wanted the dancing to look like someone who’s being forced to do a TikTok dance over and over. Patrick Macht and Micah Henry, two super talented folks who I’ve had the pleasure of working with on all the videos for this album, designed the creepy screen mask I’m wearing in the video.

3.What was the process of making this video?

We went to a parking lot in Vancouver after dark and I danced around in the screen mask, totally unable to see anything, while the crew called out directions to me. Micah drove around me in his mini-van, with a crazy lighting rig attached to the roof, making it look like some sort of alien observation vehicle.” 

Toronto’s Ekelle rhymes about what she knows best: her real-life experience! Money, sex, drama, and identity stir together to create a style she calls Hood Pop – popular music with a street edge.

“Your baddies are your real ones, hustlers who get shit done and keep it moving,” Ekelle says about her aptly titled new single “Baddie,” which is “perfect for pre-gaming with your girls or driving around on a sunny day.”

Currently, Ekelle is an artist in the RBC Launchpad Music Entrepreneurship Program, guided by her instincts and a passion for music, pop culture and fashion. In 2022, Ekelle dropped her first album, Let’s Get It, landing song features on the video game Boogie, TV show Hudson & Rex and the Stanley Cup Finals. 

After years of crisscrossing North America, Europe, and the U.K., playing in bands such as Sam Weber and Luca Fogale, Jacob Weil found himself with a collection of his own songs that he was ready to share. The indie-folk debut record, Lived In, was produced by Sam Weber. The album’s production is fast, innovative, and intelligent, and the songs are filled with strength, grit, tenderness, courage, and nostalgia. And, like a string of images, Weil leads us through observations and experiences that have led him to where he is now.  

Co-written with Luca Fogale, the focus track “9999” is about multiple realities – more specifically it represents the nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine ways out of ten thousand that your life could have gone, had you made one specific decision, as opposed to another. It’s a reflection on a life, a relationship, whatever, where you made a decision, and things ended up one way instead of another. 

In this situation, the song is about a relationship that felt so right, where everything was so perfect, and yet it didn’t work out. It’s about imagining a multitude of realities, in which, if you lived the same life 10,000 times, you just happened to be living in the one where things didn’t work out. 

“The album started off as a collection of songs from different periods of my life – periods of significant growth and change,” explains Weil. “I didn’t begin with a set throughline between them, but it became apparent later on as I was looking back at them that they all shared a commonality – a reflection on what it feels like to be part way through one’s life and have a mind, body, spirit and even home that feel ‘lived in.’”

Joel Plaskett is a beloved east coast Canadian singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose music brings together the energetic melodies and hooks of power pop, the muscle of hard rock, and more intimate singer/songwriter fare. Plaskett’s songs are a perennial part of the national playlist, a fixture on “best of” lists, and the soundtrack to the lives of faithful fans across the country and around the world.

When the YMCA in Vancouver asked Plaskett to play at their “virtual campfire” over the pandemic in 2021, he figured he’d write a song for a real campfire and the real moon above. Written with the beautiful simplicity of three chords, Plaskett started and finished “Hey Moon (A Campfire Song)” 15 minutes prior to recording it for the livestream. 

“This version gets kind of rocking for the summer festival stages but it’s basically a folk song at heart,” says Plaskett. “My hope is people will write their own verses for the moon and sing the chorus together.”

In the 90s, iconic artist Chin Injeti fronted the R&B group Bass is Base which had fans all over the world and garnered him a deal with Canada’s Universal Music and Island Records in the United States. During that time, Bass is Base won a JUNO (Canadian Grammy) for Best R&B record and a MuchMusic Video award for their song “Funkmobile.” Additionally, Chin was dubbed SOCAN’s Songwriter of the Year… but this was just the beginning of his success.His latest EP, VESSELS: Volume Two, includes the melancholic yet humorous single “For Better or For Worse” (feat. YBTB). Life doesn’t always work out the way you planned. Evidently, you are not the same person you were when you were in your 20s or 30s. Chin and YBTB have crafted the perfect message that represents who they are and who they’ll be moving forward.

For 15 years, David Vertesi has appeared as an integral part of some of Canada’s most exciting indie-rock projects. Whether he’s playing in Hey Ocean!, Shad, Dear Rouge, Hannah Georgas, or Said the Whale, producing Haley Blais, Noble Son, Ashleigh Ball, or Riun Garner, Vertesi brings a uniquely sensuous and brooding sensibility, an intricate sonic depth that multiplies the layers of a song. 

In his solo work, these dramatic flairs ignite on full display. Vertesi has an equal command over choreographing lush technologic atmospheres of instrumentation as he does squeezing the naked emotional core from a piano, steady bass drum, and the soft plucking rhythm of a guitar. But it’s his own voice that distinguishes these spectrums of rough-and-tumble and tightly polished stories of confusion, loneliness, death, and ennui. Vertesi’s growling inimitable baritone deepens the tender poetry and sense of humour as he emerges centre-stage as a fully formed front-man of his own musical expression.

“This song was born out of the individual and collective renegotiation of self that I have witnessed since 2020 and the beginning of the pandemic,” Vertesi explains. “With my band of 15+ years [Hey Ocean!] on indefinite hiatus, I was attempting to do this for myself, however, I couldn’t help but notice pretty much everyone around me was doing the same: leaving jobs, moving cities, ending relationships. But whether mourning or celebrating the loss of our old lives it seemed like we were all asking ourselves the same question.”