Yes in My Backyard: Victoria

This article is part of New Feeling's Yes in My Backyard – a series where we highlight local music scenes and the artists who make them.

So-called Victoria, BC is located on the easternmost point of Vancouver Island, requiring at least a two-hour ferry ride to reach the city of Vancouver. This land is the traditional territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən People, known today as the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. As the provincial capital, the city is significantly populated by public administration workers and an otherwise aging workforce. See also: a 10 p.m. noise bylaw, a prohibitive circumstance currently under review in alignment with the Victoria Music Strategy. 

Victoria is also situated in the earthquake hot zone of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and its cultural plates are constantly shifting, too — the music scene bolstered annually by an influx of new students at the University of Victoria and campus radio station CFUV, and supplemented by touring acts from Greater Victoria, mainland BC, and Washington. Emerging from those fault lines is a cohort of artists whose work reflects the city’s geographic isolation, political tensions, and restless creative churn, ranging from hazy guitar pop and feral hardcore to experimental sound art, Indigenous hip-hop, and noise at its breaking point.

Blush.

Not to be confused with the Toronto band soon-to-be formerly known as Blush, Victoria’s Blush. is a hazy alternative rock outfit feeling things out. Patching guitarist Anton Wilson’s acoustic six-string outlines into heavily effected guitar palettes honed by ’90s underground rock titans, the band excels at retrofitting contemporary apprehensions and inconveniences with woozy melodicism and fuzzy filters. Their 2024 EP Still Wet refined the approach, and on Feb. 2, they offered the first proper follow-up to that distorted dispatch with a new single, “Seasons,” ushering in a new cycle.

Coup D’état 

Formed in March 2024, Coup D’état swiftly installed itself in the city’s emotional hardcore scene bearing a message rooted in the material nature of trauma. On last fall’s self-titled sophomore EP, the band bridged emo, skramz, and metallic hardcore influences, offering four stark and unrelenting tracks about trauma’s systemic persistence, establishing harm as something learned, inherited, and reproduced. An emotionally literate offering, the band delivered tempestuous vignettes and heart-rending accounts over spoken-word sequences and fractured pleas, voices contorted into grotesque guttural exorcisms while jagged guitars carved up a violent landscape. 

death make stardust

Trading in big and shaggy emotional compositions identified within the lo-fi, klezmer, post-rock, and anti-folk traditions, coining a “boohoograss” portmanteau along the way, the only recordings currently available from Sam Kantor’s death make stardust project are confined to a small handful of demos on Bandcamp. Demos in the truest sense of the word, those are brief and austere sketches of song ideas. But in recent live gigs the project has swelled into a teeming big band configuration, Kantor’s guitar, voice, and drum machine compositions elevated to righteous heights with a full band, including drums, bass, fiddle, tambourine, and the occasional, trombone or lapsteel.

faun.a

Begun as a looping project in 2017, electroacoustic musician Alyse Johnston’s faun.a has grown into an ongoing practice of personal archiving and place-finding. Emphasizing geopoetics and relationships to land, the project explores everyday sources of environmental ambience as a way of listening to environment and exploring the present. On 2025’s salish coast EP, Johnston accompanies the Pacific’s continuous filling, draining, and refilling of a craggy hollow at Dallas Beach with the murmurs of a bass clarinet and a heavily gated electronic pulse. Elsewhere in their work, Johnston conjures daydreamy drones with violin, bansuri, and an assortment of hardware electronics.

Niloo

Preserving ancestral lore and reimagining it for the present, Niloo Farahzadeh weaves influences from ’60s and ’70s-era Iranian pop into a gentle haze of folk psychedelia and dreampop, lush guitars and cushiony melodies weaving a modernist tapestry in conversation with the migratory realities of her heritage and diasporic identity as an Iranian-Canadian woman. On 2025’s Sour Cherry, memory and modernity blur and traditions bend without breaking, coalescing into songs that feel deeply personal and expansively transportive, home echoing through the distance of reverb and longing.

Pet Retina 

The braintrust behind local noise and noise-adjacent presenters Near Dark Shows, in Pet Retina, Lauren Kale (Void Puppet) and Maxwell Patterson (i.o, really loud free jazz) combine their proclivities for circuit bending and math rock percussion to hazardous effect. Cracking open rhythms and toy interfaces alike, they push every instinct and component to hellish extremes, beats splintering and boards screaming while haunted melodies dance into collapse under the feral momentum. The result is hypnotic and confrontational, locking bystanders in place before prompting them to dodge the debris.

PINDN

A stated continuation of their nations’ storytelling traditions, Kwakwa̲ka̲'wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth M.C. Alex Taylor-McCallum’s PINDN confronts the intergenerational impacts of colonization while honouring their West Coast lineage, old-school hip-hop, and the trickster spirit. A constant presence in so-called Victoria’s music scene, in 2025 they gripped the mic at punk shows, City Hall, and renaissance fairs alike — solo, accompanied by their Nation of Creation band, or performing with This Is the Glasshouse (as This Is the Big House). They also curated Eventide Music Series’s 2025 N8V HIP-HOP NIGHT. Their debut album Spirits Back is set to release later this winter.

A Recorded Dawn

Backs ever facing the crowd as they labour at their instruments, A Recorded Dawn have garnered a kind of cult appreciation for their largely instrumental, widescreen post-hardcore compositions and virtually anonymous live shows. Stoking brooding, melodic vignettes into mountainous crescendos for the audience to inhabit, an entire scene has arguably assembled around the four-piece locally, previously synonymous with Fairfield’s straight-edge outpost Linden House before guitarist/vocalist Josh Ohler (All That Decays, Hose) moved out last year and shows have since had to find new homes.

Shoplifter

Slackened post-punk by way of Dinosaur Jr. and Joy Division, Shoplifter evolved out of members Curtis and Cam’s pre-pandemic project Numbing. The trio hasn’t released any new material since their self-titled EP arrived in 2024, but they spent last year touring and supporting bands like Hillsboro, PISS, and TONER, ironing out some new ideas and experimenting along the way. In June, the band gave its half-sung vocals a rest to let its slurry blend of gauzy guitars, driving bass and splashy drums take over with a fully instrumental set for a Near Dark gig.

White Collar

Interrogating performative liberal politics’ penetration of punk poiesis, hardcore punks White Collar set a sneering standard for contemporary rebellion. Pummeling listeners with stream-of-class consciousness tirades on identity politics, slacktivism, and the weaponization of therapy speak, singer Loosey C. and the band set the scene on fire and spare no detail on hypocrisy within their own community, snakes climbing ladders, or the creeping gentrification that follows libertarian homesteaders. In 2024 their self-titled EP packed 12 tracks of riffs and righteous grievances into just as many inches of vinyl, and last year the band delivered a new demo, suggesting more to come.