The winner of the 2024 Polaris Music Prize will be anointed on Tuesday evening at Massey Hall in Toronto.
The prestigious $50,000 award will be handed out to one of the 10 acts nominated for the best Canadian album of the year as decided by a jury of music critics based on its artistic merit.
Nominees from Toronto include rappers DijahSB and TOBi, and indie rock quartet the Beaches. The list is rounded out with Inuk singer Elisapie, Montreal punk rock band NOBRO and Charlotte Cardin, who recently won the Juno for album of the year.
The Polaris short list typically spotlights rising Canadian acts to a wider national audience but, in a rare instance, seven of this year’s contenders have already won Junos, the country’s top music award.
Tuesday night’s Polaris Gala, hosted by last year’s winner Debby Friday, will feature performances by most of this year’s nominees although Charlotte Cardin has announced she won’t be able to perform due to a recent COVID diagnosis.
Here’s a closer look at the 10 nominated albums.
Bambii: “Infinity Club”
A DJ and producer, Bambii has been a key figure in Toronto’s underground music scene for years. In 2013, she founded JERK, a biannual rave that celebrates Caribbean culture and global dance music while carving out a space for people of colour and the LGBTQ community.
Released last August, her debut “Infinity Club” — which won the 2024 Juno for electronic album of the year — is a genre-obliterating album that melds elements of dance hall, jungle, U.K. garage and rave music into a high-octane alloy that sounds both global and uniquely Toronto. You can almost feel the sweat dripping from the lead single “One Touch,” which stacks chopped up dance hall vocal samples on top of blistering breakbeats and thunderous basslines.
“Infinity Club” represents an attempt to capture — and distil — the thrillingly immersive energy of the dance floor, Bambii told the Star in an interview last year.
“I’m trying to evoke those very transient, fleeting moments, and make a statement on why they’re transformative,” she said. “With the direction the world is going, and how difficult it is for people to access joy or freedom or imagination, this project is speaking to those moments when we can truly be ourselves.”
The Beaches, “Blame My Ex”
Toronto indie rock band the Beaches were everywhere this year — the band’s breakout single “Blame Brett” was all over TikTok, while their second LP, “Blame My Ex,” took home the Juno for best rock album and group of the year.
“Multiple breakups contributed to the bittersweet New Wave sparkle of ‘Blame My Ex,’ a proper, pugilistic, album-length followup to the Beaches’ ripping 2017 debut, ‘Late Show,’” Ben Rayner wrote in a profile of the band last fall.
The band also split with their former management and got dumped by their international major-label overseers at Island Records and Universal Music Canada in 2022, so there was a spirit of “go for it” hanging over the sessions for what would become “Blame My Ex.”
“Our goal with this record was to reach younger audiences and have that connection with young female fans,” guitarist Kylie Miller said. “We started listening to a lot more ‘pop’ and ‘alt’-leaning artists, people who are kind of doing things a little bit weirder, a little bit quirkier … pulling from different influences and not being stuck in this idea of ‘What is rock ’n’ roll? What is a rock band?’ I think that’s what really helps separate this record sonically from our other ones.”
Charlotte Cardin: “99 Nights”
The second studio album by Montreal pop singer Charlotte Cardin is a diary of the summer of 2021, she explained to Jonathan Dekel in the Star last summer: “A time when Cardin and her partner, the actor and musician Aliocha Schneider, were at an uneasy crossroads in their relationship. Across the titular timeline, Cardin wrote the bulk of the material that ended up on the album, which oscillates from party anthems to eviscerating balladry and everything in between.”
This musical kitchen sink approach, Cardin explained, was the result of using her time in the studio as a means of “escaping that reality that I wasn’t necessarily comfortable or well in.” Riding the success of the lead single “Confetti,” “99 Nights” received international acclaim and took home the biggest prize of the night at this year’s Juno Awards.
DijahSB: “The Flower That Knew”
The latest project from DijahSB is a breezy, inviting collection of jazzy hip house tracks that doubles as a perfect showcase for the Toronto rapper’s charismatic personality, which blends humour with an understated earnestness.
“Tried to keep me down but I kept going / I’ve been through it all but I kept growing,” they sing on the album’s title track, an ode to the resilience required to make it in an unforgiving industry.
“I try to be inspirational without being preachy,” Dijah told me earlier this year. “I talk about the things that are going on in my life, but I’m not going to act like I’m better than anybody else.”
Jeremy Dutcher: “Motewolonuwok”
Arriving five years after his Polaris Prize-winning debut, Jeremy Dutcher’s sophomore effort moves seamlessly between lush neo-classical and rollicking art-rock; between Wolastoqey and English. It’s a project that feels both deeply personal and rooted in tradition, but unmistakably embedded within a resurgence of Indigenous culture underway across Turtle Island.
“This record is a lot of firsts,” he said. “Moving into new musical territories, moving into new linguistic territories, making new kinds of sounds with new musicians. It’s all kind of uncharted territory.”
Like his debut, “Motewolonuwok” continues to draw from the archival recordings of his Wolastoqiyik ancestors, but it also contains his first overtly political songs — “Ancestors Too Young” addresses the suicide crisis among Indigenous youth, while “The Land That Held Them” calls out the ubiquity of police violence in the Prairies. But across 11 songs, Dutcher is never overwhelmed by the abyss of grief, consistently returning to themes of resilience and the power of collective healing.
Elisapie: “Inuktitut”
Inuk singer Elisapie’s fifth studio album features 10 stripped-back covers of classic rock and pop songs that Elisapie associates with her community in Salluit, including renditions of songs by Leonard Cohen, Blondie, Metallica and Pink Floyd, each translated into and sung in Inuktitut. Written alongside her close collaborator Joe Grass, the album has an intimate, organic sound, adorned with subtle instrumental flourishes, traditional drumming and Inuit throat-singing.
“We recorded it to feel like home,” Elisapie recently told me. “It feels like the north.”
Since its release last fall, the album has only gained momentum. It spent four weeks in the Top 10 album charts in Canada, while her cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” became a minor hit, racking up over 1.2 million streams on Spotify. In March, after performing that song alongside Jeremy Dutcher and Morgan Toney at the 2024 Junos, Elisapie won the award for contemporary Indigenous artist or group of the year.
“I’m so happy that it’s not only my family or the people in the north who are enjoying it, but that it’s being understood by so many non-Indigenous people, too.”
“These songs are gifts,” she added, emphasizing the power of hearing a modern pop song sung in a 1,000-year-old Indigenous language. “They are made to build bridges.”
Cindy Lee: “Diamond Jubilee”
In March, the gender-bending Canadian experimental rock artist Cindy Lee quietly released “Diamond Jubilee” — “a dense double-album that juxtaposes lush, cinematic instrumentals with lo-fi indie rock jams and haunted girl group torch ballads,” wrote Jesse Locke in an personal essay for the Star.
It’s a gorgeous and unpredictable project, but one that doesn’t seem to be designed for mass consumption. Clocking in at over two hours, the 32-song opus isn’t available on major streaming services. Instead, Cindy Lee released “Diamond Jubilee” exclusively on a clunky GeoCities website, where fans can choose a high-quality stream or download the album for $30.
Despite these barriers, buzz spread quickly among music lovers and critics, who began sharing a YouTube link that contained the full album as if it was a secret. The album’s success, Locke writes, was a bold act of protest against the big streaming services and proves that it’s possible for indie artists develop a cult following organically. But to Locke, Lee’s music means something more:
“Anyone — like me — who has questioned their identity while causing pain to themselves or others can see themselves reflected in lyrics like these, with compassion coming back. Cindy Lee’s songs are an honest expression from a work in progress, just like we all are.
“In songs or onstage, Cindy Lee has the power to inspire, enrich and empower. To me, she is nothing less than a living piece of art.”
NOBRO: “Set Your Pussy Free”
Known for their raucous live shows, Montreal band NOBRO have been making noisy garage punk since 2014, but their debut studio album didn’t arrive until last October. According to fans and critics, “Set Your Pussy Free” — the title is a reference to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. v. Wade — was worth the wait.
“The camaraderie of the four women of NOBRO really shines throughout the album,” writes Karen K. Tran in a review for Next Magazine, which she describes as “unapologetic punk whose hooky tracks might spawn crossover hits in spite of them not giving a s–t.”
“We’re definitely acutely aware of just the ever-changing world that we live in,” singer and bassist Kathryn McCaughey told Next. “But, at the same time, you have to keep pushing forward and doing what you believe in and being passionate because it’s like if you’re stripped of your ability to do that, then it does become even more hopeless and even more depressing.”
Allison Russell: “The Returner”
On her 2021 debut album “Outside Child,” Montreal singer-songwriter, poet and multi-instrumentalist Allison Russell bravely shared her triumphant journey of breaking the cycle of abuse, and the power of community, connection and art.
Released last September, Russell’s second album “is a radical reclamation of the present tense, a real time union of body, mind and soul,” she said. “This album is a much deeper articulation of rhythm, groove and syncopation. Groove as it heralds the self back into the body, groove as it celebrates sensual and sexual agency and flowering, groove as an urgent call to action and political activism.”
“The Returner” was a critical success, racking up four Grammy nominations, including a win for the best American roots performance.
Among the album’s highlights is the track “Demons,” a song “about looking at our traumas, our fears, our pain in the face & not letting them drive the bus. It’s about turning Demons into Freedom Fighters.”
TOBi: “Panic”
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, and raised in Brampton, the shape-shifting rapper and signer known as TOBi moves seamlessly between hip-hop, neo-soul and R&B on his third album, “Panic.”
His influences include Kendrick Lamar, Drake and Lauryn Hill — “My apex would be if I could fuse D’Angelo and Black Thought,” he told Vernon Ayiku in the Star earlier this year — but TOBi is also inspired by West African culture. Growing up, he listened to Fuji music, a genre indigenous to Nigeria’s Yoruba tribe that is known for its lively percussive tones. It’s a production staple on “Panic,” his third studio album, which took home rap album of the year at this year’s Juno Awards.
“We made this album with a lot of love for humanity and the marginalized people of the world,” he said after performing at the Junos telecast. “As we liberate the least of us, we liberate all of us.”