Tom Beedham

Cola’s first two albums were filled with wiry atmospheric post-punk that channeled anxiety into hypnotic grooves. The Toronto/Montreal band’s third album, Cost of Living Adjustment (C.O.L.A.), released May 8 via Fire Talk, is pervaded by a sense of drift and dislocation. For Cola frontman Tim Darcy, those themes became painfully concrete in January 2025, when the deadly Eaton Fire tore through Los Angeles’s Altadena neighbourhood, destroying the home he shared with his partner. “Over the course of an hour, we lost everything,” Darcy tells @tom_beedham . The experience became central to the emotional atmosphere of the album. “Conflagration Mindset,” which the band describes as “a north star” during the album’s writing process, retraces the diners, hotels, and temporary spaces Darcy and his partner passed through while fleeing the flames. Built from one of Cartwright’s demos — a whirring, synth-driven sketch Darcy calls “almost Burial-like” — it conjures an eerie sense of removal and instability. Across the 11 tracks on C.O.L.A., homes and domestic spaces are sites of class immobility and anxiety, places haunted by aspirational archetypes. The album’s title nods to the affordability and inflation crisis in Canada, and many of its songs linger in the strange and emotional terrain produced by precarity. Read full story online (link in bio). Photo by Wyndham Garnett.

Local YIMBY reporting here from “Victoria, BC,” AKA @gigtoria , where I live now. Between a 10PM noise bylaw, an aging workforce, earthquakes, and a restless underground scene, there’s plenty of friction here, so I put together a scene report for @newfeelingcoop ’s TECTONICS issue. 🔗 link in bio 🫨

​​Earlier this year, @raespoon announced their prodigal return to country music with a cover of Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” and a new aesthetic undertaking loosely codifying what they termed 𝔥𝔶𝔭𝔢𝔯 𝔠𝔬𝔲𝔫𝔱𝔯𝔶 🏜 A class (im)mobility anthem, the cover landed in a year defined by transphobic resentment politics and heightened ideological policing at borders. I caught up with Rae while they were back in their former hometown Calgary just weeks ahead of the Stampede for a story in @newfeelingcoop ’s Nightlife issue, and our conversation kept circling back to the politics of refuge and why country music’s folk class roots still matter. Rae recently followed up their Brooks cover with another of Charli xcx’s “Apple” and this story is probably the single piece of writing I’m most proud of this year, so it felt right to give it a spot on the grid. Gently recommending if you have a beat to dig into a longer read over the holidays! 🔗 Link in bio 📸 Photo by @wynneneilly // hyper country remix by me

It’s been really great watching the chaotically collaged big tent anarchism of @emmagoldmanband take off this year. For @newfeelingcoop , I connected with the whole band to talk about their very busy year and the ambiguous utopias driving their modernist Ursula K. Le Guin-indebted debut, ‘all you are is we.’ Link in bio ⛓️‍💥

A report just published by the Chamber of Commerce says Canada’s arts & culture contributed $65 billion to the national economy in 2024 – 2% of the economy. But cuts are looming, and the budget gets tabled on Tuesday. My latest for @thegrindto at the link in my bio.

I guess I’m shooting shows again? April 5, 2025 (last Linden House show ever) 1. A Recorded Dawn 2. Mourn Recif 3. Emma Goldman 4. Had camera problems during Coup D’état’s set so for posterity here’s a chopped vert video of them playing “Losing Meaning” maybe for the last time ever.

march madness~

In this dispatch, @tom_beedham attends Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Toronto concert — at Drake’s aptly titled History club — on the night of the U.S. election. "Time isn’t a renewable resource, and how we spend our political energy is of critical importance." Link in bio.

@evicshen x @venusfestival dump

Reviewed Madonna for @exclaimdotca the other night. Still processing… Link in bio🔗

For @newfeelingcoop ’s Movement issue, I wanted to take a look at how resources flow throughout the music industry in so-called Canada. @trickle_down_music — a growing, free, online resource from Calgary-based musician and arts administrator @shawnoftheshred — is working at accelerating working musicians’ access to those flows. Funding streams like grants have had entire industries of gatekeepers and barriers emerge around them, but Trickle Down Music could help level the playing field and even challenge how those flows are distributed. Link in bio 🔗

As the music industry consolidates, we're witnessing a homogenized listening landscape across the board, with fewer opportunities for regular working musicians and music labourers, and even less meaningful representation for diversity of musicians across vectors of gender, class, and ethnicity. In my latest for @newfeelingcoop , I sat down to untangle the complicated conditions of the catalogue acquisition gold rush that took off early in the pandemic. Big thanks and appreciation to Andrew deWaard (@dewaard ) and David Turner (@pennyfractions ) for speaking with me and lending their insights to this piece. 🔗link in bio🔗