Bio

New Zealand / Los Angeles, CA

She was born in Ōtautahi (Christchurch), New Zealand, but Em-Hayley Walker really came to life when she launched the music career of her alt-pop alter-ego, Theia. As the Greek goddess of divine light, sight and vision, Theia is said to have endowed gold and silver with their brilliance. In fact, Theia was also the name of a Mars-sized planet that collided with Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, forming our moon and forever reshaping both celestial bodies. Walker could not have chosen a more apt name. Theia’s songs at times shimmer in an ethereal glow, her voice a delicate, light-winged dragonfly, gently touching down just long enough to inspire silent wonder. At other times, Theia sings with all the rage and fury of a misfit, religion-traumatized girl living in a savage, colonialistic world. 

Oral traditions are important to the Māori (specifically Walker’s Ngāti Tipā, Waikato-Tainui) culture, but her fluency in the te reo language actually came from studying it in university. It was during her university years that Theia’s music started becoming popular with campus radio stations and social media. Theia’s first official single “Roam” (2016) became the most-played song for seven consecutive weeks in New Zealand. Walker also manifested another musical entity, TE KAAHU, to honor and showcase Māori storytelling and singing. Now living in LA, Theia is making huge waves on this side of the ocean and is an unstoppable musical force to be reckoned with.

– Chantal Vitalis

Bio

Montreal

Having spent her early career distilling the disparate elements of Caribbean, Appalachian and Francophone folk music over her first three full-length albums, Montreal artist Kaïa Kater focused on reinvention and experimentation for her latest release, 2024’s Strange Medicine.

 While Kater’s banjo continues to anchor her songs, Kater and Strange Medicine co-producer Joe Grass (Elisapie, Barr Brothers) experimented with a varied sonic palette of strings and horns, giving the record an orchestral and cinematic feel while the percussive instrumentation and off-kilter grooves offer an esoteric jazz-influence. Also featuring collaborations from contemporaries and luminaries Allison Russell, Taj Mahal and Aoife O’ Donovan, Kater’s Strange Medicine reflects the struggles of women and oppressed people through history, with deep meditations on her own life and her place in these stories.

 With a Juno nomination and a Polaris Prize long list on her list of accomplishments, Kaïa Kater is taking bold steps musically, building on her roots while embracing a galaxy of sonic possibilities, all the while maintaining a focus on the historic arc of justice for all.

 – MD

Bio

Montreal, QC

There is simply no other artist like Jeremy Dutcher. A classically trained operatic tenor and composer who sings in Wolastoquey, an Indigenous language of Dutcher’s New Brunswick Tobique First Nation, which has fewer than 100 fluent speakers in the world.

Recognizing no boundaries between classic western orchestral music and the traditional Indigenous songs of his ancestors, Dutcher doesn’t meet these styles in the middle, but melds them together in a mesmerizing musical concoction that takes the listener on a journey that is very much of the present.

Both of his albums have won the Polaris Music Award, a first in the award’s 19-year history. His debut, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, (2018) was inspired after an elder had encouraged him to listen to archival recordings of traditional Maliseet songs collected by an anthropologist and preserved on wax cylinders at the Canadian Museum of History. That groundbreaking album, bolstered by powerful live performances, established Dutcher as one of the leading lights in the growing Canadian Indigenous industry.

2023’s ambitious Motewolonuwok attempted to bring non-Indigenous listeners more fully into the conversation, with half the songs in English. One of the highlights is “Ancestors Too Young”, a gorgeous and painful song that grapples with the devastating consequences of being subject to dual discrimination for being Indigenous and queer. The song Take My Hand establishes Dutcher’s desire to connect to the broader community on his own terms as he sings, “Take my hand but not my light, the words that we find are new.”

 – Sean Myers