Hope In Dirt City

Hope In Dirt City was a major experiment for me. I spent years working on a production process where I would make beats, get them performed by a band with live instruments and then resample the results into something else. I wanted it to be ambiguous as to what was real and what was electronic. One half of the album is like that and the other half represents my time in Montreal's underground club scene, rapping over futuristic beats by people I met at 4 am at some afterparty. This was my first album after becoming poet laureate of Edmonton so I wanted to get deeper with the lyricism. I wanted every song to have enough depth that it could survive scrutiny on the page. This album was shortlisted for the 2012 Polaris Prize.

The Edmonton MC has served as the official poet laureate of his hometown, so it's surprising the strength of his third album doesn't lie in his writing or his rapping.

An exciting mix of weird and tough, Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon often sounds like Del the Funky Homosapien if he were a member of G-Unit, but on Hope in Dirt City, he's much more, breaking into a chest-beating, rock ballad scream on the hooky highlight "Conditioning" and going full dub poet on the reverb-drenched, reggae-drenched "Small Deaths."