“Spin took form in two stilted and warped years, heavy with this profound seasickness of being both empty and full,” recounts Montreal artist Sasha Cay. “Among other things, it is about outliving. Translating this into songs and sounds alongside my best friends in a basement is something I'll be forever grateful for and don’t think I can accurately put into words, which is maybe why I write songs in the first place. I hope it finds folks who might need something to lean on, similar to how I clung to a handful of records as I moved through (or laid very still) this time; dizzy, scared, and glad.”

Cay’s ability to craft nuanced feelings from understated indie-rock instrumentation shines on the new single, “See You Soon” in which the indie songstress takes a dark walk through Montreal, promising to return home but refusing to say when. As distorted bass and gritty drums drive the song forward, Sasha delivers melancholy with a matter-of-fact honesty. ‘Just so there’s no surprises,’ she sings, ‘when you get out, and I’m not around / see you soon.’

Sasha Cay lives in Montreal, the same city in which she grew up. In the back of her apartment, there’s a small room with a washing machine and enough space for one chair and her roommate’s rickety easel. It’s where she goes to sit with her guitar and write with the hum of laundry whirling beside her. Her songs often start in that room, the sounds of zippers and buttons scratching the dryer door bleeding into demos.

Sasha cut her teeth on Montreal’s bars and DIY venues, playing and hosting open mics and performing with local punk and psych rock bands, doubling as a filmmaker, bartering music videos for studio time. In 2017, she emerged with a collection of bedroom recordings — lofi indie songs inspired by the idiosyncratic tunings of Nick Drake & the spontaneity of the Velvet Underground.

These short Bandcamp releases as well as her EP Arthur’s Party Trick (released independently in 2020) paved the way towards her forthcoming debut LP Spin, as she and her drummer Rhys began making music together by recording a Nirvana song for kicks to test out the DIY studio Rhys had just set up in their apartment basement. There, the rest of the record took shape, friends across the room putting their feet up on the couch, cracking cans open and clapping at the end of takes (sounds which can be heard on “Sugar”, the album’s opener—fittingly the first song Sasha and Rhys recorded together).

A guard held on her prior release fell way as Spin began. The fable-like quality of her earlier songs remain present, but are now paired with a contenting candour - through gritty rambles and echoey distortion Sasha sings frankly of the unraveling of violence and loss. On the first single “Comedy”, time drags on as “everyday” is repeated like a mantra. The song recounts the absurd timing of the events of Fall 2021: in October, Sasha was hit by a car while biking and was being looked after by a close friend before they suddenly passed away while Sasha was still recovering. “Friends took care of me,” she says. “I had to stay very still, I couldn’t hold a conversation for very long. My head spun. I listened to a lot of records; I wrote when I could manage it. I made a lot of jokes.”

Sasha’s music stretches out across stark realism and literary narrative, tucking humour in the odd corners of songs. They puncture dreamy musical contours; they epitomize the magnetic timewarp of remembering what’s happened to you. Spin is less the simple recounting of darkness than the unfolding and refolding of it - examining what may lie on the periphery of these experiences — “like a secret, there, sleeping” she sings.

Live, Sasha and her band play on the record’s flipside. What was first sung in hushed tones in a laundry room and recorded in privacy of a basement breathes viciously alive on stage, reflecting the punk scene that Sasha played in as a teenager. The quartet moderate the raucousness of their performance with playfulness—their chemistry and friendship on display as the band makes room for Sasha’s nonchalant vocals and freewheeling guitar. Though these songs may have been written in the aftermath of trauma and loss, they express a true joy on stage—as though the curse can be momentarily suspended and lifted when shared.