Cadence Weapon

Bots and online activists. Tech gentrification and algorithms. Phone addiction and wellness culture. Through his urgent rap anthems, Cadence Weapon captures these dizzying contradictions of modern culture and technology with both precision and irreverence. The Hamilton-based rapper, producer, former poet laureate, and author of Bedroom Rapper (2022) also known as Rollie Pemberton got his musical start while careening through the rap internet as a teenager in Edmonton, Canada. He emerged as an artist who gave voice to issues of systemic inequality and racial disparity, particularly among Canada’s Black communities, with his fifth album Parallel World, which won the 2021 Polaris Prize.
Now, with his sixth studio album, ROLLERCOASTER, arriving April 19 on MNRK Music Group, Pemberton expands his incisive commentary to the sprawling internet—a former utopian playground that’s turned into a capitalist junkyard—to remind users they don’t have to just “go along for the ride,” he says. The impetus for the project was a February 2022 trip to Los Angeles, where Pemberton witnessed technology’s growing influence on society, as seen through the “optimization” of every human interaction and transaction. “I was observing parallels between the fraudulence of certain institutions and the fake news of the internet,” he explains. “With bots and people being willfully false for profit, the internet has led to a total obfuscation of reality.”

The hyperpop and electro-inspired production of ROLLERCOASTER replicates the internet’s “sensory overload.” Its credits include Grandtheft, Jacques Greene, Machinedrum, Cecile Believe, Martyn Bootyspoon, Loraine James, Taydex, Wesley Singerman, myst milano, and Harrison—a combination of tried-and-true Canadian collaborators and “fellow Black weirdos,” as Pemberton puts it. Acoustic interludes from Bartees Strange break up the discord, reminding listeners that they can get back to a more “organic” mindspace, that maybe they should, indeed, touch grass. “He was this siren beckoning you into the album,” Pemberton says, “this mysterious voice that you hear every so often.”

Despite its bleak portrait of today’s digital attention economy, ROLLERCOASTER still fits into a long lineage of Black electronic artists using music to forge Black futures—much like the seminal Detroit techno duo Drexicya, whom Pemberton references on the album. (“On a wave like James Stinson, better pay attention,” he raps on “Lexicon.”) It goes hand-in-hand with his work outside of music, as he frequently uses his platform to shed light on musicians rights and financial realities. He recently spearheaded the #MyMerch campaign with UMAW (Union of Musicians & Allied Workers) and FAC (Featured Artists Coalition), which seeks to eliminate venues taking merch cuts from artists. “I feel I have a responsibility to use my skills to help people and build organizational power for other artists and music workers,” he says. By illuminating the current issues of the world, Pemberton inspires others to join him in the fight for a better one.