Welcome to the end of July! Maybe it’s just because we’ve completely lost our perception of time over the last year and a half, but this month and this summer feel like they’ve flown past faster than they have any right to. It’s hard to believe that just thirty days ago we were releasing our staff picks for The Best Music of 2021 (So Far) and we’re already staring down the barrel of back-to-school supplies.
We managed to fit in a very full month’s worth of work, especially thanks to the help of a couple of new contributors: Dan Chamberlain and Steve MacIntyre. Hopefully, you’ll be hearing a lot more from them.
Quarry Island. A small chip of land not far from New Glasgow, NS. It is secluded, sedate, and cradled in nature. Quarry Island is, in short, everything that Brooklyn, NY is not. Yet it is here, in the company of friends, and with the world standing still, that Nat Osborn, a native New Yorker wrote his most reflective album to date. Continue reading Castaway in Nova Scotia: Nat Osborn Tells His Story on ‘The Quarry Island Sessions’→
A year and a half ago, in the final days of the Before Times, The Burning Hell’s Ariel Sharratt and Mathias Kom were on the far side of the planet, preparing for the release of their newly recorded album, when the unthinkable happened. The world shut down.
Their album, Never Work, very quickly turned from an apropos tongue-in-cheek perspective on the state of the gig economy into something that bizarrely prophesied their immediate career prospects and societal collapse.
The time has come once again, dear readers, to render our inboxes into playlists. We’ve scientifically and democratically processed every song sent our way, studied it meticulously, crunched the numbers, to arrive at this: The Best Music of 2021 (so far). This is our playlist. There are many playlists like it, but this one is ours.
Among everything else that happened this month (David Myles turning a funky new page, one of New Brunswick’s longstanding craft breweries going up for sale, Matt Steele admitting to a professional narcoleptic habit, and more), something funny happened. The East took home two East Coast Music Awards (read: they’re in the mail) in the categories of Media Outlet of the Year and Media Person of the Year. We’re pleased as punch and honoured to be the recipients of these awards.
But enough about us! Here is everything we covered in June of 2021.
