Music and Riots

NEW ARRIVAL___________
▪️MONO
Snowdrop
(Limited Edition on Double Boysenberry Vinyl)

When MONO recorded their previous album, OATH, with longtime production partner and friend, Steve Albini in 2023, they never fathomed that it would be the final studio album they made together. Albini tragically died the following year, and that loss left an incalculable void in the lives of not just everyone who ever knew Steve, but everyone with an attachment to any of the thousands of records he helped bring into the world over the past four decades. On both a personal and practical level, the loss left MONO faced with profound grief and uncertainty. Albini had become a fundamental part of MONO’s unmistakable sound, and the thought of replacing him was daunting, to say the least.

Enter: Brad Wood (Touché Amoré, The Smashing Pumpkins). Chosen for both his familiarity with MONO’s creative and technical working process (as well as his decades-long friendship with Albini) Brad Wood entered the storied Electrical Audio studios in Sept. 2025 to record what would become Snowdrop. Once again working with Chicago-based conductor and orchestral musical director, Chad McCullough, MONO enlisted a 10-piece orchestra as well as an 8-piece choir for the eight massive pieces that make up the album.

NEW ARRIVAL ______________
▪️WIDOWSPEAK
Roses
(Limited Edition on Cherry Vinyl)

Across the ten tracks that make up the seventh and newest Widowspeak record, intimate spaces and stages of love are captured with a nostalgic, vaseline-coated lens. Candles burn inside red glass as lovers get close in a leather booth. Celebrity headshots gaze down like angels in a restaurant. Elsewhere, carnations are pressed in a black book and dancers pull each other close. Widowspeak is a band that riffs on big emotions without being too self-serious. The sweetness, even silliness, of an extended limerent phase that becomes as all-consuming as a pulpy trade paperback. Cars and their drivers serve as a way to talk about codependency. And old love gets worn in, soft as an old t-shirt. If music can simultaneously be naturalistic and noir, saturated and lush, that is Widowspeak. They’re a band that knows how to set a scene.

These songs use intimate moments to talk about deeper heartaches: the restlessness inherent in modern existence, waiting around for something to happen, or feeling at odds with playing a role in your own life. Roses might be the most romantic Widowspeak record, but it’s also the most deeply realist: the stage is set not with dramatic overtures but the backdrop of the minutiae and repetition of daily acts. Here, love is a way to talk about what drives us, and Widowspeak suggest it can be the whole point. The light that illuminates the dark corners of a day, a life. A reason to keep going despite the pain it can cause.

NEW ARRIVAL ________________
▪️SLIFT
Fantasia
(Loser Edition on Double Sparkle Starlight Vinyl)

In the technical sense, every previous album by the radiant and heavy French trio SLIFT has been a fantasia - a composite of genres and forms that allowed the band to improvise, to jam on themes until they seemed to spiral together into space.

Their acclaimed third album, 2024’s Ilion, was a sci-fi story built with 10 to 13-minute exploratory escapades, often starting with doom metal or stoner rock before spinning freely into glorious instrumental oblivion. But, in a bit of intentional irony, SLIFT’s fourth album is actually called Fantasia. It’s their leanest and most direct record to date; taken together, its eight songs clock in at less than 50 minutes. It is also their most riveting album yet, a pointed saga about overcoming international upheaval delivered by a band bearing down, not wasting a single second in the process.

NEW ARRIVAL _________________
▪️Fire-Toolz
Lavender Networks
(Limited Edition on Lavender Marble Vinyl)

Fire-Toolz productions feel like a cloud of colourful tags that you can catch like items in a video game if you listen well: cybergrind, metalcore, emo, screamo, glitch, grindcore, prog, IDM, New Age, post-vaporwave, noise, smooth jazz fusion, avant-garde, etc. But on Lavender Networks, her artistic freedom defies all definitions and labels, by melting them into something wholly unique. It's the bottomless pit in the centre of a lush environment.

NEW ARRIVAL _______________
▪️IDLES
Caught Stealing OST
(Bone White Vinyl)

IDLES and acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) quickly formed a creative kinship, united by a deep mutual respect for each other’s work. When Aronofsky began developing his latest film, Caught Stealing (starring Austin Butler and Zoë Kravitz), he turned to IDLES, his favorite band, to shape the film’s sonic identity. Drawing inspiration from the gritty energy of the 1990s New York punk scene that permeates the film, IDLES contributed four original tracks, a striking cover of “Police and Thieves,” and recorded the full film score, composed by Rob Simonsen (Deadpool & Wolverine, The Whale, Foxcatcher).

NEW ARRIVAL _______________
▪️BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE
Remember the Humans
(Black Vinyl)

Marking their first new studio album in nearly a decade, the LP reunites the Toronto collective with producer David Newfeld, who helmed their breakthrough You Forgot It in People (2002) and self-titled 2005 album. Across the 12 tracks the arrangements are dense and enveloping - a lattice of horns, guitars, voices, and electronics - yet melody always remains sovereign, refusing to be swallowed by the sheer sound. When the music drifts towards abstraction, a grounding bass line arrives to anchor the listener, reminding us always that there are human hands on the controls and that, however artful, this is still rock and roll.

As ever, Broken Social Scene operates less as a band than as a community and songs evolve by ceding control to whoever can best carry them forward in the moment. Drew may be the designated driver, but collaborators on Remember the Humans, including Hannah Georgas, Lisa Lobsinger, and Feist, step into the foreground throughout the record, shaping songs with a sense of collective authorship that has always defined the group’s ethos.