Roam Is the Producer Bringing Dark UK Garage to Toronto on ‘REMNANTS’

The many links between London and Toronto have been well-documented: the two cities share ballooning housing prices, the same Caribbean-derived slang, as well as a love for rowdy rap and robust indie rock. There’s a third layer, deeply hidden, a mutual appreciation for offbeat dance music. It’s this world that Roam, a member of the DSTRY collective that also includes Teddy Fantum and G Milla, taps into on his new album REMNANTS.

You could loosely classify the music here as similar to the murky, dark UK garage/dubstep fusion that Burial crafted on his classic works. Roam lets his drums skip and skitter around moaning, soulful vocal samples on opener “Ashes,” and if the sub-bass on “Say It” were any lower it would be outside of human comprehension. But REMNANTS isn’t derivative at all; a healthy dose of post-OVO hip-hop gives the album a distinctly emotional GTA character. Listen to how the kicks of the otherwise garage-y “Bitter” hit at erratic, enraged points, or how “Blame” lets melancholy piano cast a pallor of rainswept introspection on the song. If modern Toronto were a Serial Experiments Lain episode, this would be the soundtrack. Stream REMNANTS below.

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