The Toronto natives are a special sort of awesome, and have a great sound that is completely reminiscent of punk that came before, but also wholly unique. This is a band who isn’t afraid to be wild with it. Listen to Human: that’s a sound aware of the past, but completely dispassionate about sounding anything like it today. Especially as it gets towards its end and breaks down into its off-kilter bridge.

And while we’re on the topic of Human, let’s be honest and say that Weaves’ drummer is bloody tight. That guy is on. He’s one of my new favourite drummers.

The record is bound together by a consistent aesthetic, but not necessarily by a consistent style. That is to say, while Weaves has a sound all of their own, each song sounds different. A song like Birds & Bees, which reminds me Self (before he appeared on the Shrek soundtrack), sounds like Weaves while still being a completely unique song on the record.

The effect is powerful: a couple listens to Weaves is enough to assert that the band is a wholly original take on a retro genre styling, but also able to craft memorable and unique songs. It’s pure magic — the sort of thing you’re lucky if an artist can do once in their career, never mind on their debut.

Whether you’re listening to the punk-y One More, the jittery Coo Coo, or the panic-laden Candy, Weaves have a sound that’s all their own. It’s one of the most exciting punk albums of the year, and certainly one of the year’s best debuts. It reminds me a lot of the first time I heard Nirvana; the same energy is there.

Weaves is the sort of band you listen to so you can see them live, and I’m really hoping to catch a show soon. This record is phenomenal; I can’t say enough good about it.

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Most metal fans like it when bands have a unique sound and they don’t mess with it. There was outcry when Metallica went mainstream, and now they’re one of the most hated bands in rock history (for a variety of reasons). Every metal band that goes “mainstream” inevitably loses fans — often because it means losing the magic that made the band what it was.

But for Gojira, going mainstream doesn’t seem to change their core at all.

The story behind Magma is tragic: brothers Joe and Mario Duplantier suffered the loss of their mother early in the recording sessions for the album, and it dramatically shaped the songwriting and sounds of the rest of the record. It’s obvious from the opening notes of The Shooting Star that the band is trying to express grief with their somber music.

In The Cell, a brutally hardcore track, the band shouts “No control over anything… Get me out of here; I’m lost in the dark.” It sums up the record’s stages of grief exceedingly well: the band is wading through the loss of control and the haze of death, and looking for an escape.

In that sense, when they upend things by putting tracks in a seemingly odd order, and sacrificing some of the pacing of the record, we get the sense as listeners that the album wasn’t really made for us. It was made for the Duplantier brothers. We’re fortunate enough to be able to listen to it, though.

Almost every track on the record is worth talking about for some merits. The vocal performances are incredible: the band sings, and actually sounds excellent doing it, on many tracks. Again, it suits the somber tone of the record.

But then there are tracks like Stranded, where the band is in full-out experimental mode, with guitar solos that purposefully misdirect, a chorus that feels more hard rock than heavy metal, and a vocal performance that is as emotionally arresting as it is surprising. Despite the sound being more approachable, these songs are not radio-friendly singles.

Magma also has some of the shortest tracks of Gojira’s career. Yellow Stone comes in at one minute and nineteen seconds, with a brooding bass line that carries it through. It’s the dividing point on the record, one that spends a brief moment in silence (compared to the barrage that much of the rest of the album offers) and then moves on.

The biggest surprise, though, comes with the last track. Liberation is a wordless acoustic track (a first for Gojira in my memory) that exists as the denouement. It might be that the Duplantier brothers aren’t past their loss, but they’re trying to move on. They want to be liberated.

Magma is one of metal’s largest achievements this year. Listening to it gives me the same feeling I had the first few times I listened to Mastodon’s Crack the Skye. It’s an album that’s ostensibly not for fans. It’s not meant to be an experiment, but because of its extraordinary self-indulgence, it comes off as one. But it’s also an immense delight. Magma is the rare metal album that I’d suggest to nearly anybody.

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The story goes that Tom Petty first saw The Shelters in a club and took a liking to them, showing them to his home studio and letting them mess around with things and showing them what he thought they could be. Viewed through the lens of a “guitar pop record that Tom Petty would encourage somebody to make,” The Shelters’ debut makes a lot of sense.

And it’s not to say that the band’s style eliminates the possibility of them working on original material. Songs like Birdwatching, Surely Burn, and Down deviate from the script, taking some influence from 70s punk and the grunge scene.

I’m quite partial to Nothin’ in the World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ‘Bout That Girl, which feels like an old-time blues track combined with an oddball White Stripes moment. The tracks like that on this record are obsessively fun.

What makes the whole album work, more than some people might suggest when they call it a throwback, is the way they bring together an obvious reverence for the past with a modern sense of groove and motion, giving the sound an update for the modern era without alienation fans of that old-style rock and roll.

The Shelters won’t be loved by everybody, but it feels like a band that many of us can at least appreciate. For a debut, it’s impressive. And although it doesn’t play with too many new ideas, it makes me believe that The Shelters have a few — and I’m excited to hear them sometime down the line.

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99.9% might not be the perfect dancing record, but it feels like it was tailor-made for the club — even when it’s being more experimental. I’m in love with Track Uno (which is, of course, the first track). Off-kilter note selections harken back to old-school jazz, but what really works is the way the loop becomes a pulsing, living thing throughout.

When Kaytranada experiments with rap and hip hop, he takes it in surprising directions. Glowed Up features Anderson .Paak, so I was expecting a bit of an R&B track, but it’s one of the hardest hitters on the record. It’s different for Kaytranada and Anderson, making 99.9% feel like a safe place for everybody to try new things, even after its halfway point.

Some of the other tracks feel old-school in a way that makes Land of the Loops feel modern. In Weight Off, for example, the dominating bass line dares to play with an Egyptian-like Dorian scale (I think it’s the Dorian scale, any way), offering a sound that’s both vintage and unique at the same time.

And it moves perfectly into One Too Many, which feels perfect for a good dance night. And if you’re not dancing to it, it makes a perfect song for driving around the city late at night, or playing Grand Theft Auto.

For a debut release, 99.9% is exceptionally polished, well above and beyond what most artists would ever consider attempting for round one. But Kaytranada is a whole different beast. The album is fantastic — often sensual, often club-ready, and always rich with vocal appearances that really do add to the tone of the record. This is a debut electronic record that’s not to be missed.

Oh, and we mention how wicked the album art is yet?

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The thing that I really like about Puggy is that they don’t over-indulge the synths. Maybe it’s because I grew up listening to rock and roll, but I love the way that Puggy functions as a rock trio who happen to make pop music and invest heavily in hooks.

This formula doesn’t always work — the album isn’t perfect, and there are some odd tracks here and there — but more often than not, you have a record that’s perfect for highway driving in the summer. The chorus in Soul is so easy to pick up and sing that my wife got it after hearing it once, and we sang along together like a couple idiots while driving to visit my parents recently.

Other tracks are great because they feel like alt-rock dance tracks. Where It Wants to Be is great because it has an awesome riff, but you still want to move your hips and dance with it. It reminds me of Jukebox the Ghost (in the best way possible).

I could say the same thing about Feel so Low, a country-influenced dance track that borrows the a-rhythmic claps from Radiohead’s The King of Limbs and its attitude from old-school country and Django Reinhardt-style chord changes.

The album’s quieter tracks don’t work as well. Sadly, there are too many of them in the mid-section that brings the album down. But the final three tracks are fantastic. I’m particularly fond of Territory, which is a surprisingly aggressive track that doesn’t fail to hold its audience captive. The chorus is so different from the rest of the record that it’s almost shocking.

If it were packaged as an EP with a collection of its biggest crowd-pleasers, Colours would be among the year’s best short spurts. As it is, it’s a refreshing listen that’s perfectly suited for summer parties and jamming out in the car. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need.

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I just want to congratulate you The Last Days of Oakland; I think it’s phenomenal. Thank you very much.

I know your story, but in your own words, would you be able to share it for the readers who might now know who you are? Well, I was born in New England to a pretty big family of fourteen children. My parents moved us to Oakland when I was about twelve years old, and I hit the streets of Oakland and never really came back home. It was such a hotbed of culture and temptation and music and art, and I decided I didn’t want to come back home.

And then I became an artist myself, scored a huge record deal with Interscope Records, one of the biggest ever. Getting signed to Interscope really was the end creatively. I was in an environment that I didn’t know how to function under, in a corporate world.

About four years into it, I was involved in a car accident. I was in a coma for three weeks, and it destroyed my playing hand, my right hand. Upon that happening, I was finally released from my contract under Interscope and began the second phase of my life as a musician.

I became involved in music lessons, and getting my music into film. That was a way to make a living, and it was liberating that I could really create incarnations that could make a living.

I pretty much resigned from the idea of making music after about eight years. I moved back to Oakland in California, decided to become a farmer, grew a lot of weed… And other stuff, but mostly weed. I wanted to live the whole spectrum of being a human being. I wanted to see what it’s like to have a child, to try to create a family. And having a child returned me back to music.

For a few years, it was a slow walk back and it became my third life as a musician — Fantastic Negrito. And I decided to just keep playing in clubs and talking to labels. And a few years later, here I am. I’m in Baltimore — it’s pretty exciting.

I hope that sums it up in five minutes.

Yeah, that’s amazing, thanks. Back to your new record: The Last Days of Oakland is so great. I had trouble even describing it. To me, it’s genre-defying and a really eclectic brew of sounds. Can you share what inspired that? I think, really, what inspired it, is that I try to be truthful and not perform. I think that I was torn. I noticed there was a shift that was happening in every major city that I would go to. It seemed like the same thing was happening over and over again. The cities were unaffordable, black populations are leaving… It seemed that even people that grew up there, and the cities were their hometowns, now they’re facing the fact that, “Hey, this may be our hometown, but we can’t afford to live here.”

This is me focused — you don’t want to see me get eclectic!

And it felt like there was a huge disproportion, financially, between classes of people. It seemed bizarre. It seemed very acceptable to young people that worked multiple jobs just to pay the rent. I don’t think it’s very sustainable. I think that some of these cities had amazing things come out of them because of their accessibility for all people. And you had artists being able to live in the cities, and they were just shared, you know?

And I came up with The Last Days of Oakland because I grew up there, where this exact thing happened. It just made me delve into that as a songwriter, and that’s where I came up with the concept. It’s the last days of Oakland because it’s the last days of London, and Baltimore, and all these cities.

I think we’re witnessing a shift.

Do you think there’s a solution to that? Do you want people to take away from your record that there’s a solution to the problem? I think that, when you’re under attack, that you have to come together. And the way that I made The Last Days of Oakland was through a collective. I know that sounds like a real simple answer, but it’s actually good because you’re not taking all the risks, you’re not making all the decisions. Even the space that you’re creating music in, everyone is contributing — financially, creatively. It’s getting out of the “me” game. I used to be pretty big in it. I’m pretty self-absorbed too.

I’m a guy from the hip hop generation who just happens to be into black roots and blues.

It’s good to just give up control a little bit, and lean on other people, and let people lean on you. I feel like that’s the solution. I know it sounds really simple to people, but that’s exactly what I did and I’ve never felt better. When I went in and made the record, I even had to get past a few dudes… Even though I’m the producer, I’m writing songs like Hump Thru the Winter, or About a Bird, or Scary Woman, obviously. And I feel like you gotta get past a couple of them, in terms of sonically, where you’re going.

And it’s interesting, because I’m pretty eclectic. This is me focused — you don’t want to see me get eclectic! This is me trying to stay in this mode. I’m always picking from the garden of black roots music, and I’ve never wanted to do it the way that anybody else does it, and sound like anyone else. It was always my goal to try to sound as original as possible and take an approach that’s genuine and transparent.

That’s how I approached all the songwriting, and even the production. I was looking for space and rawness, and emptiness. You know, I’m a guy from the hip hop generation who just happens to be into black roots and blues. So I think I take that approach a little bit, but not too much. It’s a very fine line, and a multi-layered, interesting recipe, because you want to keep the general rawness of the Delta blues, which is really my biggest influence, but at the same time, you don’t want to do it the same way it’s been done before.

I think you did that really well. I get that from listening to the record. Oh, well, thanks! I tried. I had the collective to kick my ass when I didn’t stay true to it.

I wanted to ask you about your songwriting process, actually, because of your car accident, and how that damaged your playing hand. Did that change the way you play now? How does that shape the way you write? Well, I don’t think I was… I think I’m a pretty good writer, but I was never a great player. It’s funny because I could play, you know, “Oh look, I can play all those notes!” Especially on keyboard, which is really my instrument. I just started beating up on the guitar because I couldn’t walk around with a piano.

So I started playing the guitar more, and I had to adapt the way that I play, yes. But the concept of The Last Days of Oakland, and everything that I’ve tried to represent and talk about is, hey, if you’ve got bullshit, turn that into some good shit. Roll the good shit up and smoke it if you want. The point being that, yeah, that was some bullshit, and you have to adapt. In everything we do in this world, we’re going to have situations that aren’t favourable to us, and we have to learn to adapt just like the current situation with these major cities being so unaffordable to people. We’ve got to adapt. That’s how we’ll survive. I feel that way about songwriting and I feel that way about life.

That perspective — which is so evident in your music too — is that perspective all a result of the car accident? I think it’s just life. I was born, financially poor, with thirteen other siblings. From that day, I always learned to be positive about everything, and I know where I got it from. Just being the runaway, and streets, and surviving foster care. One thing led to another, and I always walked towards the light because I really had no choice.

If you’ve got bullshit, turn that into some good shit.

Well, you have a choice. But I always felt that way. The accident was just another hurdle to jump over. The record deal’s another hurdle to go over, and I’m happiest that now it’s useful to other people. And my failure is now music for the people, and I think that’s great. I’m happy to get out there every night, and lead all these enthusiastic people who are connected with the music.

I have two questions left for you. I usually ask about streaming services like Spotify, and Apple Music. I’ve been listening to your music for probably about two years — since your first EP came out as Fantastic Negrito. And I’ve listened to it on Rdio, Spotify, Apple Music, and your music kind of goes on and off those services from time to time. As an artist coming up in this streaming era, how do you feel about their business models? Ah, there’s no money in music. That’s a tough question because I haven’t made much money off downloads or streaming yet. I hear that it’s going to be amazing soon, but I didn’t get back into this to be famous or make a lot of money. I really did it for me, for the spirit, and for the health of the spirit, and for therapy — music is my therapy. I don’t know enough about streaming. There doesn’t seem to be that much money in it. The way I look at it is, this is the new model of the music business, and again, you just gotta find other ways.

But I’ve read articles that say streaming is going to bring the music business back. But I don’t know. I’m not well-versed enough. Maybe I should be.

It’s all speculation, right? Your answer is totally fair. I’ve heard people say it’s the future and I’ve heard people say it’s going to destroy them, so who knows? You know, it’s so good not to be thinking about that. In my view, I’m thinking about music. And there are ways to make money. Touring, and merch, people really support you on that. And licensing. I’ve done a lot of licensing. I did Empire, I did The Good Wife, I’ve done all these shows. Vampire Diaries. There are ways, man. There’s always a way. I don’t like thinking about how I can’t do things, so I never walk towards that. I just walk towards what can happen. Somebody try to stop me over here, and I just go to the other side. And again, maybe I need to know more about streaming, but I’ll tell you that there’s not much money at all in it.

I’d say your attitude is the healthiest out of everybody I’ve talked to. Well, good, I like that. It’s about the music man. I’ve learned so much about going out, taking my guitar, and letting people decide. When I did that, it changed my life. We debuted on Billboard at number four. You know, we’re not rocking with a record label, we’re just people who love music, and we want to make great music. We don’t care about hit records; we care about making great music. I think that’s where it’s at, and you can be really happy in that state.

Great. This is my last question for you, and then I’ll let you go. You’re on tour right now with Chris Cornell. Yeah!

What are you listening to on tour? What records do you have on rotation on the road? I got a chance to check out J Cole more. I remember hearing him in passing, and thinking, “Wow! That seems impressive.” But I finally got to really listen to him, and I really like what he’s doing.

I checked out a little bit of Chance the Rapper. Not much. I mean, I heard it passing, so I checked him out some. There’s another girl I just looked at from England. I just saw her on the Tiny Desk Concert. I didn’t catch her name, but she’s an English solo singer. We’ve been listening to some Nina Simone on the road, because how do you not listen to that?

Those are the spectrum right now. I’m rolling with the guys in the group, and they’ve got some stuff that, I don’t even know what it is, but it sounds really cool.

Well, thanks a lot for taking the time for this today, I appreciate it. And thanks for having me! Appreciate it, man.

Fantastic Negrito’s The Last Days of Oakland is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and iTunes.

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