Production-wise, this song is an unbelievable collage of styles – it’s like EDM, punk, trip-hop, and arena rock all at the same time. It’s very hectic, and the momentum of the rhythm section is palpable throughout. The digital and analog elements don’t take turns so much as collide, which is exactly the point; the friction between them is where the song lives. What keeps it from flying apart is the underlying drive – there’s a relentless forward motion that holds the whole chaotic thing together, pulling you through the genre whiplash rather than leaving you stranded in it.

Massé calls finding that convergence point “serious business,” and the production backs that up. “Rocker on a Club Run” isn’t content to gesture at the rock-meets-club concept from a safe distance – it actually sounds like both things happening at once, which is considerably harder to pull off than it sounds. International Breakthroughs is shaping up to be one of the more genuinely adventurous debut albums coming out of the Canadian indie scene this summer.

The Don’t Waste My Time (LA mix) EP drops June 16th as a limited-edition 7-inch vinyl alongside a digital release, with the A-side getting the full treatment and the B-side already out in the world. Both tracks feature Grammy-winning pianist and synth player Leo Genovese, drummer Johnny Radelat, and bassist George Athanas – a lineup that gives the project serious weight behind the performances.

“Don’t Waste My Time (LA mix)” is the more straightforward of the two – live-feeling rock with a lot of genuine grit behind it. The driving guitar riffs and soulful choruses land with the kind of directness that doesn’t need much ornamentation, and the band chemistry makes it feel like a room full of people playing together rather than a track assembled in pieces. The message – stop letting invisible limitations dictate how you live – is delivered with matching conviction. “Get There Before Noon (LA2 mix)” is the more experimental one, with electronic layers that get quite hairy and insane at key moments in the song. Genovese’s synth work is the key ingredient here, pushing the track into psychedelic territory that the A-side doesn’t venture into, and the contrast between the two sides of the record is clearly intentional – one foot planted in classic rock grit, the other reaching for something stranger and more textured.

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As a 7-inch, the format suits the release well. Two songs, two distinct personalities, one clear statement of artistic range. 4FRO Nick has been building this project across cities and across years, and the LA mixes feel like the sound of someone who has finally landed exactly where they needed to be to make the record they had in them.

The title track makes the mission statement clear. It sounds exactly like what the project has been building toward – stadium-scale emotional country rock with high dynamic peaks and valleys between the verse and chorus, with a transitional pre-chorus that earns every bit of the lift it delivers. The architecture is deliberate: quiet, grounded verses that let the lyric breathe, then a chorus that opens up into something much larger. Lead single “Headlights in the Drive,” which TJ has described as the emotional core of the EP, captures that specific late-night ache of trying to be present with friends while one part of your mind is somewhere else entirely – waiting, watching, wishing for a specific person to pull into the drive. It’s a precise and relatable feeling, and the production frames it well. “Backroad Serenade” leans furthest into the Americana side of the sound, the kind of track that fits the porch-light imagery TJ leans on throughout, while “Back to Me” closes the EP on a note of restless resolve.

The honest caveat with Knowing the Risk is that the AI-assisted production approach, for all its cinematic ambition, does result in the five tracks sitting in a notably similar sonic space. The textures that make the title track hit so effectively – the atmospheric swell, the controlled dynamic range, the high-fidelity sheen – show up across all five songs with little variation in tone or color. For an EP built around storytelling, that uniformity can work against the individual tracks; when every song occupies the same emotional register sonically, the narrative arc of the listening experience flattens somewhat. TJ is clearly aware of the tradeoffs and has been upfront about his process. The songwriting itself is strong enough to carry the weight, and the emotional honesty that runs through the project is real. Knowing the Risk is a genuine step forward for Eye of TJ, and the pivot it represents is credible. The highway metaphor he returns to constantly – the empty road between where you’ve been and where you’re going – turns out to be a pretty accurate description of where this project stands right now.

Aesthetically, it’s like an alien singing about a very human experience. The lyrics are barely decipherable through the idiosyncratic delivery – a spacey, breathy vocal style that prioritizes texture and atmosphere over legibility. Musically, it complements that approach completely. Thematically, the lyrics are introspective and psychedelic in the sense that they feel like a very small part of a much bigger story, one your head fills in as you embark on the journey with them. Lines like “we hung our souls up with clothespins” and “drink in the darkness in our wrists” land as impressions rather than statements – vivid enough to mean something, open enough that everyone who hears them will mean something slightly different by them.

That quality – giving the listener room to project their own story into the gaps – is the defining feature of the Nick Drake and Low Roar comparisons the press materials reach for, and Taschuk earns them. “A Kiss” is not a song that explains itself, which is exactly right for what it’s trying to do. Dyna Dyvest, if this single is representative, is shaping up to be one of the more interesting debut albums to come out of the Canadian independent scene this year.

This song has everything you expect – a great rhythm section, a huge wall of sound like classic feel-good arena rock, with a massive organ supporting the guitar riffs. Big backup vocals create that sense of ecstasy, a full-throated celebration of everything about the American South. It’s the kind of production where every element is doing its job loudly and proudly: the guitars churn, the organ lifts, the vocals stack up into something that feels communal by design. There’s no subtlety being attempted here, and none is needed – this is music built for rooms full of people who already know all the words, or will by the second chorus.

Woods has been doing this long enough to know exactly what a song like this needs, and the band delivers it without second-guessing themselves. “Welcome to the Southland” is unabashedly what it is – a big, warm, patriotic country rock anthem with its arms wide open. In the live setting Woods describes, it probably hits exactly as hard as intended.

And Kings County has the right hands for it. “What Now” captures that 70s and 80s huge rock wall of sound – the kind where guitars feel like a physical presence in the room, and everything is big by design rather than by accident. The production is dense without being cluttered, and the live feel of the performances is very much intact; this doesn’t sound like a track assembled in pieces, it sounds like a band playing together and meaning it. The real weapon here is the vocalist, who has the pipes to match the song’s emotional register completely. The intensity the track demands gets delivered without strain, which is the difference between a hard rock song that works and one that just makes noise.

“What Now” is the kind of straightforward rock song that doesn’t need to reinvent anything – it just needs to be executed well, and Kings County do exactly that. Sometimes the most honest thing a band can do is write about something everyone has felt and then play it as they mean it.

The music earns the weight of that question. Total Reverends have the kind of band chemistry where the playing feels genuinely alive rather than assembled in post, and “Where is God” uses that to its advantage. The rhythm section is the anchor – Monterisi’s drumming is hypnotic without being mechanical, and the bass line is the kind that digs in and stays there. Forni’s guitar work draws a clear Queens of the Stone Age comparison in the press materials, and it’s not wrong: the dynamics shift from high intensity to something groovier and more deliberate in a way that mirrors the song’s own emotional movement. The vocals narrate rather than perform – Forni sounds like someone recounting what they saw, not trying to make you feel a certain way about it. That restraint is the right call for lyrics that are already doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The lyric “no answer” sits at the center of the song’s whole project, and the music doesn’t pretend otherwise. The track builds and releases, builds and releases, and never arrives anywhere conclusive – which is exactly the point. “Where is God” doesn’t ask its question to resolve it. It asks the question to show you the faces people make when they lose everything, and leaves you to sit with that.

“Heterotopia” is cinematic and quite surprising at times – there’s a lot of music here, and the way one song weaves to the next flows really well. It’s an album that’s meant to be listened to in one sitting from start to finish, and in that way, they’re upholding the art form of the album, unlike the trend these days to curate music specifically for short form content and loops. You get to explore a shifting sonic palette, and that alone tells a story aside from the main lyrical method of narrative delivery. The music tells the side story and provides context and movement to the story here, and the way the band shifts dynamics from powerful, aggressive sounds to haunting and borderline disturbing ambient sounds serves the storytelling marvelously.

The title track is symphonic in its arrangement, starting almost like a horror movie cue with a simple yet harrowing piano line and then unleashing the might of this metal orchestra. The deliberate dissonances in the riffs and how they descend chromatically create a terrifying spiral of sound. The intermission that breaks off the song into two halves features ominous drones and breathing sounds that add to the disturbing atmosphere invoked by the lyrics, and then when the band comes back in full force, it just makes that much more impactful.

“Immaculate” has an intro riff that sounds like someone blowing into Gjallarhorn itself, ushering in the indescribable evil that emanates from the lyrics like ancient words that aren’t supposed to be spoken out loud. Their voices screaming “Immaculate reflection!” sounds like a thousand frenzied demons shrieking, and the legendary bassist Steve Di Giorgio tearing it up in the breakdowns make this one of the heaviest tracks on the album. The performances here are immaculate indeed.

“Begotten” is an example of those surprising tracks I mentioned. It starts off with drones and what sounds to my ears like Mongolian throat singing, and it builds to a relentless blast beat as the main vocalist trades vocals with Camilia Bayazi’s soaring vocals. The relentlessness crashes down to an ambient section with a saxophone in a borderline jazz noir-inspired section that conveys desolation and hopelessness. The ambient section is very similar in function to the intermission in the title track. The band knows their strengths, and they are playing to them.

Heterotopia is the kind of record that rewards the listener who gives it the full, uninterrupted sit-down it asks for. Primordial Black is operating in a space where extreme metal, cinematic atmosphere, and genuine compositional ambition don’t cancel each other out – they compound. For a band this young in their discography to already have this kind of control over texture, pacing, and darkness, the only real question is where they go from here.

The song’s message is blunt and unapologetic: discipline, accountability, resilience, and self-reliance. No one is coming to save you. Strength is built through confronting hardship rather than avoiding it. It’s the kind of lyrical territory that nu-metal and industrial metal have always gravitated toward, and X-Anonymous delivers it with the expected crushing intensity – industrial textures, aggressive energy, declarations like “this is my life, my war, my skin” sitting atop a dense sonic framework. To a trained ear, the production has qualities that raise questions about whether human hands or generative tools are behind it, though the band’s press makes no such admission and all available coverage treats it as a real act. Maybe that’s part of the artistic statement itself to make you question if it’s real or not.

Regardless, the message lands clearly enough. The neuroscience angle gives the philosophical framing more credibility than most bands in this lane can claim, and “Stand Your Ground” does what it sets out to do: it’s a functional anthem for the adversity-as-growth crowd, punchy and purposeful if not especially surprising.

The individuals’ personal stories coming through the music are what this genre has always been about – it was never about re-inventing sounds. These songs are like modern folk songs, just some friends expressing themselves. The intention behind every note is communicated brilliantly, just effortless self-expression. This isn’t music made for the sake of fame or any superficial reason. This music is made out of the necessity to express oneself and to connect to others, to say: we’re here, and this is our experience.

“Best Is Yet To Come” is specifically about watching the people you love navigate the inevitable peaks and troughs of life and quietly wishing them through to calmer ground. It’s a generous emotional premise for a comeback single, outward-facing rather than self-congratulatory, which tells you something about where the band’s heads are at after sixteen years. The twin guitars and patient builds carry the weight of everything that went unplayed in the interim, and the cathartic lift when the hook arrives feels genuinely earned. Three more singles still to come before the year is out – the FAMILY EP is worth following in full.