ROLLERCOASTER - Vinyl LP (Green Moss)

Through his urgent rap anthems, Cadence Weapon captures the 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, 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 hyperpop and electro-inspired production of ROLLERCOASTER is intended to replicate the internet’s “sensory overload” and exhibits his growing skills in merging socio-political commentary and insurgent rap with humor and pop sensibility. 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.