
The holiday album: occasionally classic; more often, a cash-in. As an audience, we mostly tolerate, rather than love, holiday albums. They d...
The holiday album: occasionally classic; more often, a cash-in. As an audience, we mostly tolerate, rather than love, holiday albums. They d...
First announced in March with an intended May release date, Kelela's Hallucinogen EP's five-month delay may have something to do with her mo...
Most bands would rather not have to audition lead singers 15 years into their career, just as they are recording their seventh album. But fo...
"If you kick a dog long enough, the dog bites back." That phrase is the central theme to Ottawa's Souljazz Orchestra's rise of the prole...
"More than anything else, the biggest crime as an artist is to be boring." Phonte Coleman, the primary songwriter, vocalist and animated...
If any lyrics succinctly capture Alessia Cara's music industry experience so far, it's the very relatable refrain, "What am I doing here?" f...
Every Foreign Exchange album is a departure, an abrupt turn from what you've come to expect that takes a minute to grow on you. Tales from t...
Blood seems like an odd title for Lianne La Havas' sophomore album. One's immediate word associations veer to the macabre, to violence, to p...
Few things are as falsely claimed in popular culture as the word "raw." Raw was Eddie Murphy at his zenith; it was Big Daddy Kane when he wa...
On the most recent episode of their podcast, The Music Snobs asked if the Internet are the only band moving R&B forward. Much debate and dis...
"I'm different now from what you've seen before," Lianna La Havas assures Exclaim! firmly as we discuss her new video for the song "Unstoppa...
For the better part of a year, Chance The Rapper has been warning us about his crew the Social Experiment and their upcoming Surf album, the...
"I've been a stranger in a distant land, I'll be coming home," proclaims Nneka on "Believe System," a tone-setting introduction to the diasp...
House Of Many Rooms is a collection of varied experiences, sounds and memories organized in some semblance of a place one might call home. L...
It's quite probable that we would have got Laila Biali's House of Many Rooms years earlier, but Sting got in the way. Well, so did Chris Bot...
After raking in numerous Junos and Latin Grammys for his last few albums, Cuban-Canadian B.C. musician Alex Cuba is back with his fifth solo...
Singer Mayer Hawthorne figures he and producer Jake One made the best Pitbull song ever. Of course, this was mostly by accident. In early 20...
Tuxedo is the unlikely disco pairing of Seattle producer Jake One and Detroit crooner Mayer Hawthorne. Jake One is best known for being equa...
The early 2000s were perhaps the pinnacle of optimism for Canadian hip-hop. Our artists were getting signed, commercial radio finally began...
"Local" used to be a pejorative when it came to R&B in Toronto. When commercial urban radio first launched, they played good music and they...