Montreal’s Sasha Cay cut her teeth on the city’s bars and DIY venues, playing & hosting open mics and performing with local punk and psych rock bands before emerging in with a collection of bedroom recordings as a teenager  — lofi indie songs inspired by the idiosyncratic tunings of Nick Drake & the spontaneity of the Velvet Underground. These short Bandcamp releases as well as her 2020 EP Arthur’s Party Trick paved the way towards her forthcoming debut LP Spin (released September 22, 2023), as she and her drummer Rhys began making music together by recording a Nirvana to test out the DIY studio they  had just set up in their apartment. 

A guard held on her prior release fell way as Spin began. The fable-like quality of her earlier songs remain present, but are now paired with a contending candour - through gritty rambles and echoey distortion Sasha sings frankly of the unraveling of violence, recovery, and grief . The songs on Spin stretch out across stark realism and literary narrative, tucking humor in the odd corners of songs. They puncture dreamy musical contours; they epitomize the magnetic timewarp of remembering what’s happened to you. The record is less the simple recounting of darkness than the unfolding and refolding of it - examining what may lie on the periphery of these experiences — “like a secret, there, sleeping” she sings.

Live, Sasha and her band play on the record’s flipside. What was first sung in hushed tones in a laundry room and recorded in privacy of a basement breathes viciously alive on stage, reflecting the punk scene that Sasha played in as a teenager. The quartet moderate the raucousness of their performance with playfulness—their chemistry and friendship on display as the band makes room for Sasha’s nonchalant vocals and  freewheeling guitar. Though these songs may have been written in the aftermath of trauma and loss, they express a true joy on stage—as though the curse can be momentarily suspended and lifted when shared.