The Line of Best Fit

1 week ago | thelineofbestfit.com | Paul Bridgewater

For those coming to the event for the first time, it’s not just another city-based multi-venue festival but a total immersion in the culture and nightlife of downtown Montréal. The template M began with back in 2006 hasn’t changed that much: a bunch of weekday shows for the industry running across venues around the Plateau, with short sets and enough face time to connect bands to the industry and the industry to each other.

1 week ago | thelineofbestfit.com | John Amen

Even her last album, the well-polished Ten Fold, included distinct flashes of mercuriality, Bey juxtaposing idyllic scenes (of clouds and flowers, for example) with repeated acknowledgement that all things fade (death is ever-present). Still, while contemporising the R&B genre, Bey clearly drew from feel-good 70s and 80s sources, as well as the laid-back sides of Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and D’Angelo.

1 week ago | thelineofbestfit.com | David Cobbald

It’s been twelve years since the smash debut of Days Are Gone, but Alana, Daneille and Este Haim are still going strong. Over the years their music has been refined and tweaked, but what remains across their debut, Something To Tell You, and Women In Music Pt. III is their purposeful and considered instrumentation, a sound that draws on classic influences while looking ahead, and above all else, playfulness.

1 week ago | thelineofbestfit.com | Max Gayler

The Brighton-based Marriott has lived two lives at once: one offline, full of private memory and unresolved ache, and one online, where every misstep could be clipped, shared, and dissected in real time. That duality saturates Don’t Tell the Dog, an album that draws as much from his adolescence as it does from his present.

1 week ago | thelineofbestfit.com | Sam Franzini

On the new U.S. Girls album Scratch It, Meg Remy dials down the politics to pick through inner turmoil and history against a backdrop of dusty, soulful numbers. But it doesn’t mean she’s not still thinking ahead, as she tells Sam Franzini. The women of 2015’s Half Free (her first for 4AD) were waiting, wondering, and lonely, while 2018’s In a Poem Unlimited and 2020’s Heavy Light seethed with stories of domestic abuse, environmental pollution, and the lunacy of capitalism.