ADA LEA ANNOUNCES NEW EP, SHARES NEW VIDEO

WOMAN, HERE EP OUT MARCH 27, 2020 VIA NEXT DOOR RECORDS

WATCH AND SHARE “WOMAN, HERE” TODAY

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PERFORMING AT SXSW NEXT MONTH

Photo Credit: Monse Muro // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

Ada Lea, the project of Montreal-based artist and musician Alexandra Levy, today announced her new EP woman, here will be released on March 27, 2020, via Next Door Records. Today, she shares the video for the EP’s title track which Nylon claims is “a lesson in self-sufficiency.”

WATCH AND SHARE “WOMAN, HERE” TODAY

The new EP follows her acclaimed 2019 debut album what we say in private which saw praise from Pitchfork, NPR Music (‘New Music Friday: Our Top 8 Albums For July 19), Bandcamp Daily, VICE, The FADER, Exclaim!, FLOOD, Paste, and The Boston Globe, among many others. The woman, here EP acts as a bridge between what’s come before and where Ada Lea means to go next. A mix of both the old and new, Levy recorded “woman, here” recently in Los Angeles, CA, with Marshall Vore (Phoebe Bridgers, Better Oblivion Community Center). 

Perhaps her most direct work to-date, the new song offers a beautiful glimpse into the bold new chapter of Ada Lea. “I went to LA and recorded the song in a day and a half with Marshall,” Levy says of the song. “The writing and recording of this song happened like magic.” 

Aside from the title-track, which is shared here alongside a raw and captivating demo version, the woman, here EP also offers two previously-unheard recordings from the what we say in private sessions, in the form of the reflective and melancholy “perfect world” and the sparse and dream-like “jade”, which was inspired by a John Updike short story.

A fascinating glimpse behind the curtain, Levy says that the new EP should be seen as being “like a second cousin” to what we say in private. “We included the songs that we still felt close to,” she explains, “but didn't seem to have a place on the album.” 

Ahead of making her way to next month’s SXSW Festival in Austin, TX, Ada Lea will perform next at the Noise Pop Festival in San Francisco, CA, on February 29. A current itinerary is below.

PRE-ORDER WOMAN, HERE EP 

woman, here EP ARTWORK // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

TRACKLIST
1. woman, here
2. perfect day
3. jade
4. woman, here (demo)

TOUR DATES
02/29 - San Francisco, CA @ Swedish Music Hall
03/16-03/22 - Austin, TX @ SXSW

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Next Door Records is the newest label from Outside Music Inc. The new imprint will join Outside Music's artist management, publishing, and long-standing distribution divisions alongside their eponymous label.

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WHOOP-SZO ANNOUNCES UPCOMING TOUR DATES, SHARES NEW VIDEO

WATCH AND SHARE “AMARUQ” HERE

NORTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES BEGIN MARCH 5

WARRIOR DOWN OUT NOW VIA YOU’VE CHANGED RECORDS

BUY / STREAM WARRIOR DOWN - PHYSICAL / DIGITAL

“Warrior Down takes you for a sonic hike — sometimes through the wilderness, sometimes through a wasteland — never staying long in one spot or indicating the next direction. With long instrumentals that dance between chaos and calm, it's a subconscious assault on the emotions.” - Exclaim!

“Warrior Down is a perfectly paced and arranged set of songs and instrumental interludes, each a movement in its own right but ultimately in service to the record’s overarching theme.” - Dominionated (#1 Album of 2019)

“Whoop-Szo released its powerful new album, Warrior Down, at the end of 2019, giving us an impossible-to-categorize, rock-psych-sometimes-folk set of 10 songs that draw on vocalist and lyricist Adam Sturgeon's experience as an Anishinaabe-Canadian, writing about the intergenerational trauma within his family and his Anishinaabe community" - CBC Music

“Sitting at the meeting point of sludgy post-metal, and jagged folk-punk, WHOOP-SZO craft melodies that perform the dual function of encouraging your rapt attention, and effectively melting into.” - Beatroute

“Amaruq” Video Still

On March 5, WHOOP-Szo will take their acclaimed new album, Warrior Down, on the road for a run of tour dates throughout the US on the way to SXSW before returning to Canada. Full tour dates can be found below.

Today, the band shares the new video for “Amaruq” which songwriter Adam Sturgeon describes as “a visual summation of the themes conveyed on Warrior Down. It presents a vision of an Indigenous Future, one that defies being molded into the usual narrative of Indigenous identity. The ‘Noble Indian’ looks into the mirror of his past and/or present.”

Video director, editor, and set builder Ross Millar says the song “has a lot of energy, and it immediately gave us the impression that there was an adventurous story to be told visually. The challenge with miniatures is making small characters, structures and landscapes appear much bigger than they are. A lot of it comes down to tricky camera angles, lighting, and various scales to achieve depth and create an interesting cinematic environment for the viewer. 

This video is a product of friends getting together on a small budget and using their combined skills and camaraderie to make something special.”

WATCH AND SHARE “AMARUQ” HERE

Listed as one of The Most Underrated Albums of 2019 by Exclaim!, Warrior Down presents a vast and barren landscape associated with the harsh truth of Canadian History, a post-colonial firestorm harbouring moments of doom and heavy introspection while remaining true to their psychedelic aesthetic. 

WHOOP-Szo is a force of nature, sprung from a mixed-blooded experience of Canadian history with deep Anishinaabek roots. Thunderous and ground-breaking, harmonious and generative—a WHOOP-Szo show envelops audiences in an emotional weather-storm that dances conscientiously between anger and discipline, frustration and hope. They tell us about colonial injustice loudly and punishingly, with haunting chord changes and monolithic distortion. They explore the possibility of wisdom and empowerment, with acoustic melodies that calmly find space within crushing layers of politics and sound. On stage and off, WHOOP-Szo engage communities with a powerful synchrony that invites people to feel and to heal. They are passionate storytellers who knock loudly on the door, and will reward you tenfold for letting them in. 

WATCH WHOOP-SZO LIVE ON CBC q HERE

Warrior Down harnesses their power into a concise, focused 35 minutes on wax, calling out both specific instances of injustice in Canadian history — as we see in “Gerry”, or recalling Sturgeon’s grandfather’s experience at a Residential School (“Gerry”, “Cut Your Hair”) — and broader, wider-reaching ones such as the experience of having race and culture assigned to you by a government that doesn’t represent you (“6.1/6.2”). 

WATCH AND SHARE “GERRY” HERE

BUY / STREAM WARRIOR DOWN - PHYSICAL / DIGITAL

TOUR DATES
Mar 5: Toronto, ON - Baby G
Mar 12: Cincinnati, OH - Mockbee
Mar 13: St. Louis, MO - Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center
Mar 15 : Louisville, KY - Wet Basement
Mar 16: Fort Worth, TX  - Lola’s
Mar 17: Denton, TX - Fannin
Mar 18-20: Austin, TX - SXSW
Mar 21: Hot Springs National Park, AK - Valley of the Vapors Festival
Mar 25: Seattle, WA - Substation 
Mar 26: Portland, OR - No Fun Bar
Mar 27: Boise, ID - Neurolux / Treefort Music Festival
Mar 28: Boise, ID - The Hideout / Treefort Festival
Mar 29: Boise, ID - Tom Grainey's Basement / Treefort Festival
Apr 1: Abbotsford, BC - Carport Manor
Apr 2: Vancouver, BC - TBD
Apr 3: Victoria, BC - Rubber Boots Club
Apr 4: Seattle, WA - Victory Lounge
Apr 5: Portland, OR - Firkin Pub
Apr 8: Regina, SK - T & A Vinyl
Apr 9: Calgary, AB - Palomino
Apr 10: Edmonton, ON - Aviary / Mad Galaxy Festival
Apr 11: Saskatoon, SK - Amigo's
Apr 14: Winnipeg, MB - Good WIll Social Club
Apr 15: Thunder Bay, ON - Apollo 
Apr 16: Sault Ste Marie, ON - Sault Ste Marie Museum
Apr 17: Port Huron, ON - Schwonk Homestead
Apr 18: Toronto, ON - Tiny Record Store (Record Store Day)
Apr 18: London, ON - Grooves Records (Record Store Day)
Apr 21: Quebec City, QC - La Source De La Martiniere %
Apr 22: Montreal, QC - Bar Le Ritz %
Apr 23: Peterborough, ON - TBD
Apr 24: Toronto, ON - Horseshoe Tavern %
Apr 25: Ottawa, ON - 27 Club %

% with Trail Of Dead

MORE PRAISE FOR  WHOOP-SZO

“A true psychedelic group ... For WHOOP-Szo, punk, DIY and psych principles go beyond music scene bubbles and fuse with Indigenous solidarity and healing through music.” - NOW 

“WHOOP-Szo has perfected their eclectic sounds, binding the paradox of indistinguishable familiarity with themes of Canadian history, language, and culture.” - VICE

“It’s scary how good this band is” - Exclaim!

Photo Credit : Rima Sater // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

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SCOTT HARDWARE SHARES “BLU AGAIN” FROM UPCOMING LP

LISTEN AND SHARE “BLU AGAIN” SOUNDCLOUD / SPOTIFY

ENGEL OUT APRIL 3 VIA TELEPHONE EXPLOSION

“Connecting his love of both dance music and new wave pop, while subtly taking on queer political issues in his lyrics” - VICE

“A sonic leap forward for the Toronto producer, while still maintaining the inherent hazy chillness we fell in love with in the first place” - Silent Shout

“While his club inspirations are easy to spot on debut Mutate Repeat Infinity, he’s still got a least one foot in the indie pop world” - NOW

Photo Credit : Shelby Fenlon // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES

“Blu Again”, the new single from Scott Hardware’s upcoming LP, Engle, "is about feeling ‘elsewhere’” says Hardware. “It’s the fear and confusion of life’s beauty floating in front of you while your brain takes hold, but your heart does not.

The narrator says ‘a mid-day sky over beach, I’ll never see that blue again’, already regretting a moment slipping by." 

Engel, his second full-length album, and first on Telephone Explosion Records is out on April 3, 2020. It will mark the end of a three-year process of writing, recording and letting down his guard (for better or worse.) 

LISTEN AND SHARE “BLU AGAIN” SOUNDCLOUD / SPOTIFY

His last album, Mutate, Repeat, Infinity, was the culmination of a years-long obsession with the HIV/AIDS crisis and how it was shaped by capitalism. Hardware’s early years after coming out were shaped by the courage of people close to him who were dealing with difficult diagnoses. 

“Looking at these situations from a macro/societal lens must have been the only way I could process and share those years of my life and my loved ones’ lives with an audience” Hardware recalls. “From a writing and production standpoint, I was trying to re-imagine various eras of dance music and sound as urgent and vital as they would have in their heyday of the ‘80s and ‘90s.” 

Within a year of moving back (to Toronto) from Berlin, Scott watched Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and was immediately filled with its inherent curiosity. The film, in short, follows angels around pre-unification Berlin as they listen to the thoughts of the mortals they are surrounded by. 

“I sought with this album to capture the film’s velvety feeling – in turns funny, depressing, dark and mundane – in LP form” Hardware says. “These songs imagine Wenders’ angels buzzing around my friends, my family and I. Writing from their point of view allowed me unfettered access to my own thoughts about them and myself.” 

In the title track, the subject is in a relationship with a mischievous angel (named Engel,) who is probing his mind against his will. “Here he comes to comfort me, but like a fly around my head I’d sooner swat him dead,” is sung over an off-the-grid deconstructed house piano. A symphony of creaking trains and industry envelops the banging piano and delicate strings on the chorus while our hero complains “He’s here with that look again, he knows what’s happening, inside,” not, it would seem, ready for this level of vulnerability. 

LISTEN AND SHARE “JOY” BANDCAMP / SPOTIFY

“Millionaire” swoops in on a courtship doomed from the beginning: “He’s a Millionaire, and what a Millionaire says goes”. A sense of inferiority follows the protagonist in his efforts date a richer man than himself – the romance being cut short because of the poorer man’s insecurities. He decides: better to be alone than to feel beneath. 

“Millionaire” is the most delicate song on Engel. Sullen guitars glide over a rolling plain of harps, drones and underwater motifs with Deidre Nox’s beautiful vocals bringing an almost camp level of melodrama to its crescendo as Hardware and Nox sing together: “you can feel him like he’s always been there.” 

The song ends on a sour note, in a swamp of drones and fallen electrical wire buzzes – and back where the protagonist began. 

“Survivor’s Guilt” ties Engel to Hardware’s previous work with its premeditation on illness and the grief left in its wake. A digitized voice reads a sister’s eulogy to her brother lost to suicide after years of losing his friends around him to “a disease.” The six-minute instrumental takes respective production cues from both Boyz II Men and vaporwave. A chopped voice asks sadly, ‘How can I survive surviving?’ before Nox appears once again, singing the song (and album) to sleep. 

Engel’s cover art is adorned by an image by artist Chris Curreri called the Insomniac. Curreri’s work winks and nods to queer sex, emotionality and darkness, and this piece is no different. This is work that reaches back to queer artists such as Francis Bacon and brings back with it a timeless everyday horror faced by queers: shame. 

These are artists who visualize monsters and demons hiding in plain sight. Like singing to dead queer ancestors on Mutate, Repeat, Infinity, Hardware is trying to make sense of another queer cross-to-bear, this time coming from within. The image is gory and difficult, not unlike the process of digging shame from one’s spirit. Engel, in its preoccupation with angels, the afterlife and private thoughts holds hands with the image. 

PERFORMANCES
Feb 26- Toronto, ON - The Boat w/ Korea Town Acid & Lee Paradise

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ENGEL TRACKLIST
1. Intro
2. Millionaire
3. Blu Again
4. Joy
5. Engel
6. Left Hand
7. Bound Together
8. Survivor’s Guilt

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