The first song on Inevitable places its narrator inside the thing the album sets out to escape: “flesh and blood, part of the machine.” On “I U Me,” Sasha Kristoff describes a life of appetite without nourishment, “so close to getting what we want, not what we need,” with every grab at what’s “within our reach” ending in the verdict that “it’s not the same thing.” Then comes the noise, “all of this noise inside my head,” followed by a plea to cut it out, to be taken away, to be sung to sleep. The song answers with a mantra, “I am you and you are me,” repeated until it becomes the last thing the song says. Connection arrives as the only exit from the static, and the second verse names where the narrator is standing when it does: “awake inside a dream, in between what’s real and memory,” a line that doubles as the band’s own name.
The sound around those words rests on the contrast this Waterloo, Ontario quartet has made its signature: piano-led verses that swell into walls of distorted guitar, with electronic atmospheres and an art-rock sense of theater around both. Kristoff sings lead and plays keys, Stefan Schneider takes guitar, Phil Lee bass and Ryan Dugal drums, and all four sing, so the swing between hush and roar belongs to the whole band. They produced the record themselves and handed it to Jay Dufour, the nine-time Juno winner whose credits include July Talk and Billy Talent, who mixed all ten tracks. João Carvalho, who has mastered Rush and The Tragically Hip, finished it. Those are the right hands for a band whose dynamics span a lone piano and a full wall of guitar, and Dufour’s mix across the whole album gives songs released between 2024 and 2026 a shared room.
“Old Ghosts” sits third and is the oldest single on the record, released in July 2024, with a stripped-back arrangement that hands the lyric nearly all the weight. The narrator is “waiting for my ship to come,” year after year, and delivers an ultimatum with no room to stay put: “take me home or let me go.” A thin veil, a face glimpsed on the other side and the question “tell me you’re okay” turn the song into half of a conversation with someone who cannot answer, and the closing worry, “will I see you again,” keeps it open. After the static of “I U Me,” this is where the noise acquires a name.
“Underwater” at track six is where the narrator stops asking to be rescued and starts giving orders to herself. The album had been moving toward that decision since the first song’s plea to be taken away. The lead single is a 2 a.m. session of self-talk, and its central image is a whale: “Let it go or swallow you whole, like a whale floating too far underwater,” a creature massive and alone, calling out in a code nobody hears. The image gives the album’s noise a scale. The head from “I U Me” has become an ocean, and the voice that once begged to be sung to sleep now talks itself awake.
The titles around those songs sketch the rest of the route. “Rewire” and “Antidote” arrive early and read as remedies tried. “Cold Shoulder” and “Faceless” name distance between people, while “Lights Down Low” and “Can’t Sleep” move the album into the dark, and “Can’t Sleep” at eight is the direct answer to the plea for sleep at one. The sequence ends in awe at what’s possible, and it names its final song for the boundary of a black hole, “Event Horizon,” a point past which nothing returns. That choice lets the album’s own title carry an invitation alongside its sense of fate.
The theater behind the record is easy to trace. Kristoff takes the stage in sequined gowns, and the band designs and runs its own synchronized lighting. They opened three Ontario nights for Carole Pope in March, including a set at El Mocambo in Toronto, share a bill with Blue Rodeo in Owen Sound on October 8, and began a ten-city Ontario and Quebec tour on September 17. A band that builds its own light show writes toward spectacle, and an album sequenced for vinyl, with a pressing arriving alongside the digital release, gives that spectacle a shape a listener can hold, with a record to drop a needle on and a side to flip.
Inevitable is a debut that tells its story in order: a narrator who begins as a part of the machine and ends at the edge of something larger.
Inevitable arrives October 16, with a vinyl pressing and pre-orders at awakeanddreaming.com.
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