Music

With a new-found sense of empowerment as an independent artist, Sophia Danai is set to release her sophomore album entitled Love Royale. Heavily featuring Danai's strong production skills and powerful vocals, Love Royale is the result of the songstress spending the past few years travelling and collaborating with a variety of artists and producers. 

Weed sound like that one young dude at the record store who knows everything and is wise beyond his years. I'm talking about the guy who, when you go to replace your used-through copy of Glass House, tells you about Billy's Ill-fated metal album so you can share a chuckle before gently steering you towards a Sleep album.

The Mountain Goats had a good thing going. They had the hearts and minds of all of the liberal arts majors that were too smart for Mumford and Sons. They could have gone to a cabin in Montana and recorded generic introspective indie trash, and we all would have eaten it up. So releasing a concept album about pro wrestling took some major stones. Wrestling is theatre, and maybe that’s why a few of the songs on the album sound like tunes from a Broadway show.

Despite having a title reminiscent of an early nineties soap opera, The Cribs’ sixth studio album is unfortunately missing any of the melodrama one might expect and hope for. Released in Canada on Arts & Crafts (who, with Bloc Party on their roster seem intent on squeezing as much as they can out of 2005’s hottest acts that excite the music supervisors from How I Met Your Mother) the newest Cribs release’s talking point is apparently the production faders helmed by former Cars frontman Rik Ocasek. Mr.

Another Eternity from Purity Ring is a journey through space seen through the minds-eye of a robo-pixie struggling against a steady diet of astronaut bread and melatonin. The first half of this album feels like an accurate representation of floating listlessly after being banished to a cold void (hi, General Zod!) with no faith in your hastily scraped-together-from-nineties-car-parts spacecraft.

Young Guv’s Ripe 4 Luv is like cutting open the perfect avocado and saying “Fuck yeah! There is nothing wrong with this one!” Ben Cook uses the freshest production on each of the 8 tracks that make up an LP that would get you up the morning even if you downed a bottle of Jameson’s the night before. Cook’s unique ability to make sure you get your pop re-fill is unrivaled. The title track’s snapping snare and guitar hooks galore are insane, but adding the vocals is simply transcendent.

One of our favourite ION cover artists, Grimes, has a new video out. Titled "REALiTi," the song was originally slated to be on her new album, but now removed, Claire Boucher decided to release it as a thank-you to her fans in Asia for their support. The video shows clips of some of the places she visited, along with footage from her shows, and, of course, dancing and jumping up and down in typical Grimes fashion.

Grimes on REALiTi:

The music festival is the peak moments in music for artists, promoters, and anyone who toils in the salt mines that are the music industry in 2015. Over the past several years, the landscape has changed, where festivals can function for some acts as their Super Bowl after a long album cycle, but for others as the first step towards a promising career. However, they are not all the same animal.