Considered one of the best rock albums of last year by Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, The Gloss by Canadians Cola is heard as a guarantee that functional post-punk is in good hands. We’ve been feeling this return to the genre for a few years now – after the wave of the 2000s – but what’s been happening in recent years is less an affirmation that rock isn’t dead, but rather the idea that all deviations from rock and pop have reached a point of exhaustion and we’re going back to simple ideas. For both the creator and the listener. The music of this trio is therefore one of constant return, it could be to the past, but they prefer the return to ideas, in this case, to simple things.
Formed in 2019 by Tim Darcy, Ben Stidworthy and Evan Cartwright, all of whom have a background of some weight – Tim and Ben were part of the Ought and Evan played with U.S. Girls – they quickly began to develop a method of experimenting with songs, letting ideas emerge as they rehearsed. As informal a method as you’d like it to be – nowadays it’s not so much – but this resulted in a Television sound mixed with ideas from Devo, Mission Of Burma and even something from Feelies, in which everything sounds short: the length of the songs, the riffs, the bass lines, the rhythm of the drums. Short or chopped up, it’s up to everyone’s ear, creating a moment of pleasure that lingers in the listener’s imagination. It was like that on their first album, Deep In View (2022) and two years later on The Gloss, where they sound more like a need than something new. The need to listen to rock, in this case, one without the urgency of innovation, of the days, for that there are other bands, other sounds looking to break through and innovate within our attention span. A rock with the time to listen to itself, to go through the past, with or without nostalgia, and make it feel like something from now, where the crudeness and boredom of the present shine through to build new memories. AS

Tomás Varela was born in Lisbon. In the second half of the last decade, he played some solo concerts or as a member of the band Aerogasmo, as part of the collective project Xita Records. And if he stopped appearing on stages around 2019 (without ever having recorded anything), that doesn’t mean he simply stopped playing. In fact, during these years, he never gave up music or composing. That’s why he’s now back with his first album . It has 10 varied songs that reflect, in their own way, different phases, thoughts or episodes of this time that has passed. Composed between 2017 and 2024, each track is a different approach to a different subject. And the album, as a whole, ends up mirroring the variety that the different songwriting occasions have brought with them. From that point of view, the album’s title should be taken literally: it’s a race or a path through life, an attempt to present yourself and the places you’ve been, where you’ve been, where you’ve stopped.
As influences, you can feel traces of Chico Buarque, José Afonso, Fausto or Fabrizio De Andrè. But that’s not all. There’s also Éme, Fernando Maurício and perhaps one or two rock bands. A bit of all this can perhaps be found on the album and in what Tomás Varela has to offer.