Canada’s first ladies of contemporary pop
Whether it’s synth-pop, dubstep or radio-hit-designed, Canucks are making noise
Outta the way, pop tarts! Make way for pop smarts.
All love to the Beyoncés and Britneys and Kylies and Rihannas of the world, but Canada is veritably overflowing at the moment with ladies like Jessy Lanza who dabble unapologetically — and exquisitely — in the realm of contemporary pop music whilst showing little interest in conforming to the standard, videogenic, skin-baring model that goes along with it.
A few of our favourites: Grimes Iconoclastic Montreal synth-pop siren Claire Boucher is so good at doing her own thing that she can now lay claim to being signed to both seminal (and appropriately Goth-friendly) U.K. indie label 4AD and Jay Z’s Roc Nation management firm at the same time. Respect.
Last year’s electro-punked-up Art Angels was one of 2015’s best albums and is a sure bet to follow 2012’s Visions onto the Polaris Music Prize short list when it’s announced on July 14.
Sample track: “Kill V. Maim” Lowell Why expat-Calgarian Elizabeth Lowell Boland’s 2014 debut LP, We Loved Her Dearly, didn’t become the hit it so obviously deserved to be — and if you doubt those words, dial up “The Bells” right now and tell me differently — is a mystery for the ages. But one couldn’t ask for a finer debut, and Lowell’s pop songwriting chops are sufficiently sharp that she’s been paid to write for the Backstreet Boys. Lately, she’s been rollin’ with Icona Pop. She’ll be fine.
Sample track: “Ride” Lights Given that she arrived as an unlikely DIY synth-pop outlier on Toronto punk label Underground Operations and then solidified her “cred” by going all crusty and dubstep and “EDM” before EDM was really a thing on 2011’s Siberia, Lights has earned the right to go full bubble gum on 2014’s Little Machines.
And oh, my, did she go full bubble gum in fine style; that wonderful, sparkling thing is just hit after hit after hit.
And lest you think Lights is hiding behind her racks of gear, she stripped most of that record back to voice and acoustic guitar with no lapse in quality this year on Midnight Machines. Real deal. Sample track: “Up We Go” FOXTROTT Overlooked in the shadow of Grimes’s Art Angels when the “best of” lists came in last year was another confidently incomparable album by a one-woman electronic act from Montreal, FOXTROTT’s A Taller Us. Marie Hélène-Delorme’s lurching, bass-bin-rattling jams are pop of a more difficult and deconstructionist bent than Grimes’, but the more time you put in the more they reveal themselves as pop.
It makes perfect sense that FOX- TROTT has been snapped up by Bjork’s One Little Indian label. The two are strange birds of a feather.
Sample track: Colors