Let’s play guessing game by making a prediction: the year 2022 will be an exceptional vintage of new discographic releases. Away from the stages for almost two years due to the pandemic, the creators have returned to their laboratories, working on new ideas and wishing one day they could present them in concert. Several musicians were waiting for the coronaviral upturn to finally unveil their new works, but their patience will have reached a limit: the floodgates will soon open, and we will be inundated with great records.
Multitude will he be one of them? Nine years after the release of Square root, Stromae will break the silence on March 4 with a third career album. Last Sunday, the Belgian made headlines by transforming an interview at Diary of 20 h to the TF1 channel in musical performance to present his brand new single hell, which addresses his “suicidal thoughts / And I’m not proud of them / Sometimes you think it’s the only way to silence them / These thoughts that make me live through hell”. What are we waiting for, this album!
If the rest of the month of January looks shy on the shelves of record stores, February will get carried away with, one after the other on February 4, the new albums of the groups Animal Collective (Time Skiffs) and Black Country, New Road (Ants From Up There, a stopover at the Fairmount Theater is scheduled for February 26) and singer-songwriters Cate LeBon (Pompeii) and Mitsky (Laurel Hell, a concert in Montreal on March 19 is scheduled), all recommendable. The following week will mark the release of a solo album byEddie Vedder by Pearl Jam (Earthing) and the arrival of the double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You from the sublime indie folk band Big Thieves, which we hope to hear on April 18 at the Olympia theatre.
The date of February 25 will mark two returns on disc, between curiosity and nostalgia. always led by Marc Almond, the new wave group SoftCell will reappear with Happiness not Included, a first studio album in 17 years; for its part, the pop-rock duo Tears for Fears, other heroes of the 1980s, will present The Tipping Point, a seventh album in almost 40 years of career.
six years later Compensation, the exciting Inuit musician Tanya Tagaq will offer on January 21 flip flops, announced by the visceral and exploratory extract Colonizer launched late last year. From Toronto, the experimental punk band Fucked Up will offer Do All Words Can Do next March 25. We will keep an eye on the new ones as well. Father John Misty (Chloe and the Next 20th Century, April 8) and two new albums by Jack White, one scheduled for April 8 (Fear of the Dawn), just before his concert scheduled at Place Bell on July 16, the other for July 22 (Entering Heaven Alive).
All this without counting surprise launches, a marketing strategy that is increasingly popular with musicians. Arcade Fire could he be tempted by the manoeuvre? Cardi B ? Kendrick Lamar ? Rosalia ? Christine & The Queens ? Beyonce ? Smile, the new project from Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead? They are all suspected of hiding new songs from us…
And the concerts in all this? The calendar was full until the arrival of summer. It was before Omicron, the reduced gauges, the closed rooms, the lights extinguished from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.
January is in the water, let’s see what would happen in February. The Offspring and Single Map at the Bell Center on February 2? Andy Shauf at Corona on the 4th? Blue Rodeo at Place des Arts on the 10th? The brilliant Courtney Barnett at the MTelus on the 11th? The hugely popular Billie Eilish at the Bell Center on the 15th? Alas, all this seems very unlikely at the time these lines are written…
So let’s bet on Mars. The American indie rock author Lucy Dacus would come and sing the pearls of his album Home Video the 2 at the Corona theater, while the same evening, the group LOW will fill our ears at the Fairmount Theater — the choice would be heartbreaking. The Electronic Composer bonobos would fill the MTelus again on March 6. On March 8, the buzz time on stage underground, a female post-punk duo dubbed Wet Leg, would present the songs from his first album, expected on April 8, at the Bar le Ritz PDB.
Place Bell in Laval would be reborn thanks to the rapper Tyler, The Creator (March 9) and to the psyche-rockers of Tame Impala (March 10). It would stir a little more at Corona with the return of metal veterans Sepulture (March 17) and the explosive post-punk of Parquet Courts (March 18) — with Mdou Moctar first part, what a beautiful program!
We would look forward to the concert ofYves Tumor at Club Soda on 1er April, and even more to that of Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier on 2 and 3 — the New Zealander Lorde will follow them on the 7th, at the same place. Perfume Genius would occupy the Rialto stage on April 3, then the next day, at the National, we would see the revivalists of Turkish psychedelic rock Altin Gun. On April 9 we would visit the young indie rock prodigy Lindsey Erin Jordan, alias Snail Mail, at Club Soda; Belgian veterans of industrial electro Forehead 242 would shake the foundations of the Society for Arts and Technology on April 16; the venerable James Taylor would visit the Bell Center on April 28.
Unless there is a new wave, of course. In which case, we will always have good records to listen to.