ARTISTS

BORN RUFFIANS

Toronto’s Born Ruffians have announced their ninth studio album, Beauty’s Pride, and in many ways, the rebirth of the band. The album opener and new single, the euphoric strobe-lit banger, “Mean Time” showcases that the band have made good on a five-year promise, following the release of their acclaimed trilogy JUICE, SQUEEZE, and PULP, to rip it up and start again.  Beauty’s Pride is set for release on June 6th via Wavy Haze Records. 

When Lalonde, bassist Mitch DeRosier, and drummer Steve Hamelin left their hometown of Midland, Ontario in 2004 to make a go of it in Toronto’s vibrant post-Y2K indie-rock scene, the world was a very different place: “digital music” amounted to mislabeled files illicitly procured on Limewire, mp3 blogs held kingmaking power over the underground, and social-media interaction was limited to checking out your friend’s band’s lo-fi demos on their MySpace page. 

Since then, Born Ruffians have evolved as dramatically as the industry around them, gradually shifting from the precocious ‘n’ ferocious racket of their 2006 self-titled EP to the streamlined, studio-savvy indie-pop of 2013’s Birthmarks to the rousing E Street-inspired anthems of 2020’s JUICE. And their creative momentum has never wavered. No matter what setbacks they encountered along the way, Born Ruffians continued to unlock new levels of productivity: the sessions for JUICE were so, ahem, fruitful, they yielded two companion releases (SQUEEZE and PULP).   And they also gained a new band member with their old friend Maddy Wilde joining them on guitar, keyboard and vocals back in 2021. 

Pretty much all of the bands Born Ruffians came up with in the mid-2000s Toronto scene are long gone—Magneta Lane, Henri Faberge & The Adorables, and Wilde’s old band Spiral Beach, to name just a few. And last year their peers, Tokyo Police Club, called it a day after a 20-year run. Born Ruffians have arrived at the point where a lot of bands give in to the nostalgic lure of album-anniversary tours or call it quits. But the beauty of their new record Beauty’s Pride lies in its refusal to accept any of those predestined fates. Rather, it presents Born Ruffians as the rare veteran act that can still make you feel like you’re discovering your new favourite band.

SHAM FAMILY

Welcome to the Sham Family.

Good on the quartet’s Toronto homeboys Born Ruffians for making it the first non-Ruffians release on their suddenly extra-intriguing Wavy Haze Records imprint. But, moreover, good on frontman Kory Ross for finally steppin’ up and doing something concrete with the “hundreds and hundreds of demos” – the handful of them that lived long enough to pass muster as Sham Family songs worthy of inclusion on this record, anyway – he’s been stockpiling in the shadows.

“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,” says Ross. “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.

The forced break that was 2020 proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it gave Sham Family time to take a second look at its material and conclude “Okay, we can do better.” And so they kept labouring away in their practice space to “hone in on this thing and just kind of perfect what we want to do,” eventually scrapping all but one of the tunes from that first studio session – the scorching, Fugazi-esque noise-rock teardown “Spitting Image” – in favour of an entirely new four-cut slab of agit-punk fury recorded by themselves that they were even more “super-hyped” to put out. Rather than drop Sham Family, the EP, on deaf ears during the pandemic, however, they’ve resisted the urge to release it until now, when there’s a little light (maybe) appearing at the end of the pandemic tunnel. And if you think these songs rip as more or less “live” recordings here, wait until you hear them tearing through you from an actual stage.

There’s an activist streak displayed on tunes like “This Blue Mob” – a seething anti-police screed written in the wake of the George Floyd murder – and the “pink”-capitalism putdown “Plaque Protection,” Sham Family wants the shows to come in support of its debut to build “community” and smash barriers above and beyond the traditional DIY-punk sense of the word. These guys have friends who move in the worlds of hip-hop and electronic music, even K-pop, and they see no reason why all those genres and all those crowds can’t mingle at the same shows. “We don’t wanna just play shows for punks. We live in Toronto, y’know? This city is so diverse and I don’t wanna just play for young white dudes. There’s so much more going on.”

This takes us back to the name Sham Family, which has no limits or restrictions on membership. All are welcome in this family. “It’s just always kind of felt like that. We’re not just a band,” says Ross. “At the end of the day, we’re all best friends. We’ve lived together forever – me and Jay have lived together since we were 18, on and off, and have been sleeping on each other’s couches since we were 12. So it’s a little bit of that, but it’s also about the community thing we’re talking about. If we have someone collaborating with us or onstage with us, then they’re just part of the Sham Family.”

MOTHER TONGUES

Love In a Vicious Way, the reflective debut album from Toronto’s Mother Tongues, is a carefully crafted cyber-psych opus that lurks between the cerebral and feral. At moments, precious and serene; in a blink, snarling, teeth razor-sharp. Its 10 songs about love, longing, desire, and identity are charged with a sincerity and teenage sentimentalism that captures a time when everything was crucial and felt tenfold. Love In A Vicious Way sees the band carving out a space for themselves: they are world-building. Like some rare bird mimicking the machines at the edge of the forest, the album echoes the beauty, darkness, and weight of life in these ever-changing times. “It’s an exploration of the darker ways we love, the parts with teeth,” says guitarist/vocalist Lukas Cheung, explaining the record’s title. “It possesses you, it’s a pit you fall into. Love overtakes you, this record is about surrendering to that feeling.”

The pulse of Mother Tongues is the friendship and creative partnership between Cheung and vocalist/bassist Charise Aragoza, who met a decade ago in a Chinatown garage turned DIY punk venue. “Char and I are both children of immigrants, a factor that has a huge impact on your entire life. You’re confronted with the need to constantly justify your existence, and this permeates into every aspect of your life–including how you create. I’ve been trying to see this as less of an obstacle and more as something that charges your work with an intensity and urgency that otherwise might not be possible,” says Cheung. “We’ve never looked like the kids in the magazines so we couldn’t get away with being derivative or a rehash. When you grow up not quite fitting into any space, you end up carving out your own. In many ways that’s what this record is. With the sound, we’ve created this atmosphere and emotional plane where we can exist. We’re peering into the future and imagining what this world could be.”

While Aragoza is no stranger to the stage–having wet her feet performing in Luna Li and touring alongside acts such as Japanese Breakfast and Beabadoobee–Mother Tongues sees her stepping into the role of singer and front person for the first time. “I’ve always had one foot in the door as a dancer and backup singer for years. On some level I wanted to be up in front, but some barrier always kept me from putting myself totally out there. Playing with other groups was my way of easing into things and building confidence,” Aragoza recalls. “You could say my imposter syndrome was too real for too long, which is something I will freely admit I continue to wrestle with. I’m recognizing it’s a symptom of my experience and what I’ve been up against: getting by in an overpriced city, intimidation in a male-dominated industry, immigrant parents who had different plans for how I would ‘succeed’ in this world. But you have this spark inside you that ultimately leads you to seek out safe spaces, safe people, and I’m also trying to create that for others. I recognize the power in representing my identities and experiences onstage.”

Writing Love In A Vicious Way was a back and forth dialogue between Cheung and Aragoza, a process that verged on telepathy. “I wrote these songs with Char’s voice in mind, no one else could really sing them–in a musical sense, but also because I feel it’s our history and closeness that allows her to carry these stories,” explains Cheung. The album takes Mother Tongues’ propensity for rich atmospherics and cinematic arrangements to stratospheric heights, riding thundering, totalizing waves of angsty alt-rock, interstellar psychedelia, dream-pop-noir, and touches of ‘90s breakbeat and electronica. 

Leading the herd is “A Heart Beating.” A goth dream-pop rocker, the song sonically splits the difference between Alvvays and The Cure; the verses speak to how we can find ourselves lost in feedback loops of regret and longing, while the chorus is a hypnotic, repeating response that calls you back into your body (“A heart beating, inside an animal”). Lush, emotionally-driven, and bookended by a massive guitar riff, “Dance In The Dark” follows, across which Aragoza challenges monogamy, instead exploring alternative ways we can reconcile with sex and romance. “It allowed me to confront my own attitudes and traumas around these topics,” she explains. “Worm Day” is a glossy pop track about compulsion and the incessant thoughts that tunnel their way into our brains–its heartfelt hooks leaving listeners nostalgic and beguiled–and “Only You” is a cyber-goth anthem, conjuring strobe lights, latex, and a breakbeat ripped from some sedated mid-’90s corner.

Cheung produced Love In A Vicious Way alongside Asher Gould-Murtagh (Born Ruffians, Kali Horse), with bed tracks recorded at Marquee Sound–where the two spent hours obsessing over the crystalline, high-fidelity production aesthetics of ‘90s on records by artists like Air or Björk–before finishing at Montreal’s Studio Toute Garnie. “While lo-fi production has been in vogue, we were chasing something else. Asher and I would joke that we were trying to make a million dollar record on nothing,” says Cheung. Cheung and Aragoza are joined on the album by Kvesche Bijons-Ebacher (synths), Lane Halley (guitar), and Nick Kervin (drums), who have played with artists like Lido Pimienta, Maylee Todd, and Zoon.

Love In A Vicious Way ultimately showcases a young band building a musical world that reflects their own unique experience, and extending an invitation to others. “We’re peering into the future and imagining what this world could be. It’s a little William Gibson, a little cyberpunk, it’s lit like a Wong-Kar-Wai film. It’s queer, it’s free, a little goth, everyone’s wearing eyeliner,” Cheung laughs. “I like to imagine our record bleeding out of the headphones of some 16-year-old in this not-so-distant universe.”