RANGE

With SO TIRED, Armstrong is summiting to a peak of self-realization. From picking up a bass as a teen and making her boyfriend teach her, to coming up in band after band as the Toronto scene slowly inched its way out of being just dudes shredding, the solo project is the first thing that’s felt truly her own. “I’d started as one of the girls on the couches in the garages, watching guys play,” says Armstrong.

The second thing they needed, crucially, were songs. “All the stuff that’s on the album, a lot of it was [written] almost out of necessity,” Beecher tells RANGE at Creeds Coffee Shop, where the band meets on a gorgeous late summer evening to discuss their self-titled debut album.

Gruesome feelings or emotional outpour can fundamentally feel like “too much” in an existing culture of nonchalance. For Paloma, it fueled what she wanted to communicate through the album and its process. Navigating this contradiction and its effects on her human experience assured her of how ridiculous it is to live in complete detachment or indifference. “I’ve never been nonchalant. I’ve never been chill about anything. I’ve never been quiet or opinionless about anything.

After an extended break from solo music, Jhené Aiko has descended from her magical sky palace, also known as her studio, to deliver a prophecy or 20 in the form of a brand new LP titled Westside Whimsy. To highlight the word “whimsy” in your album title when the last six years of your life have been publicly turbulent is a bold move, but it’s also one that Aiko does in full confidence.

While Fuentes would have stayed longer had it not been for her visa expiring, her return to the US only brought her a fresh perspective on the scene she had once adored before her self-imposed sabbatical. Imbued with the confidence instilled in her from being a part of the live experimental electronic scene in London, Fuentes set out to do something different on her new album, which turned out to be excavating herself closer to a sound she’d been craving since childhood.

If it wasn’t already obvious through the rest of Lemongrab’s discography, the band is comfortable talking with their mouth full. Fast and hard at a twelve-ish-minute runtime, their new EP Another Kind of Freedom gets a lot done quickly. The project is silly and frenetic, full of lackadaisical wit and cartoon anvils, cowbells and alien beams.

They don’t make it easy to be an Oasis fan. For most of their existence, brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher seemed almost as committed to antagonizing one another as they were to making music together, culminating in their infamous 2009 implosion in Paris, where an arena full of fans learned shortly before showtime that Oasis had ceased to exist.

“Cooked Radio is love — I would describe it as a ceremony,” the founders say. “It’s a ceremony that brings the [local] community together.” It started as a house party at Gabriel and Gera’s home, gradually opening its doors to more people before exploding in popularity. “I take a lot of inspiration from the way Latino parties work, because we Latinos, we’re very warm people,” Miguel says.

Sentimentality has always had a way of seeping into Amos’ lyrics, but now it seems to be a driving force in his sound, too. He claims Gordon Lightfoot as a major source of inspiration, particularly admiring the minimalism of his recordings. “I’ve always thought his band’s arrangements are just so interesting and tasteful,” Amos says.

Built around discovery and gathering, Purple City has become one of Western Canada’s most reliably adventurous music festivals. With a lineup this sprawling, knowing where to start can be difficult. Here are eight acts RANGE doesn’t want to miss. NYC post-punk revivalists Bambara bring a dark, cinematic bombast to the stage that is theatrically feral, completely mesmerizing and entirely their own.