Toronto Rock City

Toronto’s cityscape is defined by the CN Tower, which, at 553 metres, towers over the metropolis like a benevolent patriarch. The city sprawls out underneath the phallic tribute to the power of capitalism as far as the horizon. It is a youthful city, barely over 200 years in age. The native Iroquois and Wyandot people are long gone, displaced by French, British, Irish, Germans, Italians, Poles, Russians and the Chinese. Seemingly randomly named districts such as Cabbagetown, Runnymede and Lambton make up the suburbs of the famously multicultural conurbation.

Toronto is a city with a storied past. It’s multitude of inhabitants have borne witness to the wonderful and bizarre. The city banned slavery outright in 1834 and acted as a haven for Irish immigrants in the wake of the Great Irish Famine in the 1840s. Their mayor, Rob Ford, was caught on camera smoking crack last year and is somehow still their mayor. The city has produced the author Margaret Atwood, actor Christopher Plummer and the hilarious Will Arnett. With teams in seven major league sports, it is a city that is renowned for its sporting achievement.

In spite of this mottled milieu, Toronto is hardly a place celebrated for its contribution to the annals of music. Sure, Rush sprouted from the Willowdale neighbourhood of Toronto in 1968, Neil Young was born there before leaving as a child and plying his trade in Winnipeg, while The Band developed their craft in the city in the 60s, but it’s been relatively slim pickings since then. That is until about fifteen years ago.

Since then a succession of critically acclaimed, commercially successful, and varied bands have burst out of the city as if they’ve opened an awesome music factory in some forgotten part of the industrial district of Toronto. There’s the indie rock focused Broken Social Scene whose 2002 effort You Forgot It In People was listed 27th in Pitchfork‘s Top 100 Albums of 2000-04 and won, in 2003, the Juno award for Best Alternative Album. There’s the baroque indie pop of Feist whose 2007 effort The Reminder was listed 3rd in Time‘s Top 10 Albums of 2007, 112th in Pitchfork‘s list of The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s and eventually sold over 700,000 copies in the United States. There’s the rock opera post-hardcore of Fucked Up’s David Comes To Life, which Spin listed as it’s best album of 2011 and Popmatters listed as it’s 3rd best album of 2011. That’s not even taking into account Peaches, the newly reunited Death From Above 1979, The Weeknd and METZ. While these awards are not a direct indication of the quality of a record, they are indicative of the burgeoning influence of Toronto bands on the music world at large over the last decade.

What follows is a list of bands that have come in the wake of these trailblazing Toronto based bands. They’re young and full of spunk. Listen to them now to avoid your friends getting to them first. There’s not really much criteria for the list. They have to be based in Toronto and by “new” we mean no more than one released album (although I am highly unlikely to stick to even these minimal criteria). If we’ve forgotten any awesome bands let us know in the comments.