Music/Album Reviews

Genre: Pop/R&B/Soul
Rating: NNNNN (out of 5)
Sound: Soulful melodies and emotionally expressive vocals with a lush production base, infused with guitar-driven pop and traditional Cree-meets-modern R&B sensibilities
If you like: Rag’n’Bone Man, Teddy Pendergrass, The Halluci Nation
Best track: Ghost
Why you should listen: LOVECHILD is an emotionally resonant tapestry of songs that you will want to dance to, cry to, march to and maybe also just play for your therapist during your next session, saying, “This song gets me.”
Next: The Axis Club, Toronto, Fri., March 21

LOVECHILD, THE DEBUT ALBUM from award-winning, Toronto-based Indigenous musician, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Sebastian Gaskin, is a hell of an introduction. This album is a genre-hopping tapestry of musical influences and emotional alchemy, with soulful lyrics, layered production and emotionally expressive vocals as the gleaming silver threads that run the length and breadth of it.

Released through Indigenous-owned Ishkōdé Records and Universal Music on Feb. 21, the album comes after several years of Gaskin’s solo songwriting, followed by creative collaborations with Evan Miles (dvsn, renforshort), Milano (Icona Pop) and Hill Kourkoutis (Aysanabee, Digging Roots). While the resulting album can rightly be called R&B, it feels limiting to boil it down to just that.

LOVECHILD hits the ground running with a powerful, genre-hopping blend including classic soul, hip hop and R&B, mixed with guitar-driven, up-tempo pop. It’s infused with layers of traditional Indigenous drumming and singing as well as abstract interludes that deliver unexpected rewards.

This is all in service of lyrics that cover immense ground, crossing from flirty love song to deeply moving lyrics processing grief. Gaskin’s songs move from questions about identity, belief and purpose to cosy, soothing affirmations along with layered tracks about mental wellness and plaintive observations of the challenges inherent in being subject to racial discrimination.

All of this is to say this is a debut that has already generated a lot of buzz, and it should come as no surprise to listeners as to why.

When we connect over Zoom, still 24 hours before Gaskin discovers, in a beautiful moment documented on their Instagram account, that LOVECHILD has been nominated for two awards at the upcoming 2025 JUNOS — Contemporary Indigenous Artist of the Year for Brown Man and Recording Engineer of the Year for producer Hill Kourkoutis for the song Ghost.

But today, Gaskin sits in front of a webcam in a black T-shirt, wearing red-tinted glasses and an easy smile. They are gearing up for a long day of press and are suitably caffeinated for it.

“I just got a quad espresso Americano, so I feel it coursing through my veins as we speak,” Gaskin jokes.

LOVECHILD has been several years in the making, so it is easy to tell that beneath their relaxed demeanour a frisson of anticipation fills the air like static electricity.

“I feel like a bit of a different person than I was when I wrote some of those songs,” they admit.

“A lot of these songs were written from places of pain and grief. So, there is definitely a catharsis. I’ve held onto these songs for so long, and now I get to give them to the world and they can have their own life.”

Gaskin has a sweet, almost shy demeanour as we speak, but they also give off a sense of relaxed confidence and a warmth that comes through even over Zoom. Aspects of this album lend themselves to a sense of shared intimacy and vulnerability with the listener, and in this interview, that same openness is apparent. Thoughtful pauses punctuate their responses to questions, but answers come readily.

We talk about how safety appears as a recurring theme within the album. Safe, a guitar-driven soul ballad a la Teddy Pendergrass, looks at love as a space of emotional safety. But the album touches not only on the emotional safety — or at times, its absence — experienced in romantic and familial relationships but also the dangers to one’s physical safety that come with living as a racialized person in a society rife with discrimination. The latter is explored in the George Floyd-inspired, JUNO-nominated song, Brown Man.

“What makes you feel safe?” I ask.

“A weighted blanket,” they reply hesitantly, chuckling softly. “I love sweetgrass in the morning.”

Speaking to Gaskin reaffirms the impression of openness and vulnerability established on the album. Some tracks speak directly to the listener as if to an old friend, over calming music with subtle hints of birdsong and forest sounds in the background.

“I wanted the listener to sort of feel like a family, or like a part of the family, or like a friend, you know, tell them these stories from my life,” says Gaskin. That this cultivated mood involves the sounds of nature is no accident.

“Being in the forest, I feel quite safe because I was born in northern Manitoba … I think it’s the sense of home that makes me feel safe.”

Gaskin is candid about the real-life influences that worked their way into this album, from the loss of their grandmother Charlotte, which inspired the unexpectedly uplifting Song For Granny, to how they incorporated facets of their mental wellness practices into the making of the album.

“I had just started seeing a therapist while I was writing a lot of these songs. So that brought up a lot of different emotions, places from my childhood, throughout my teenhood and, of course, into my adulthood. For a lot of these writings, I was at the behest of my emotions.”

Within the layered sounds of ADHD Interlude, a close listen reveals words and phrases pulled directly from their own therapy sessions. Gaskin laughs in genuine delight as I bring this up.

“I love that you caught that!” they exclaim. “The ‘tools in your toolkit’ thing, it’s directly from my therapist. I recorded like 10 or 12 different vocal tracks, but you’ll hear a hand drum come in about halfway through. And that was to illustrate how I can rely on my culture to bring me back to baseline,” they explain.

From these subtle hand drums to the soul-stirring traditional singing in the chorus of the hip hop-infused R&B love song Medicine, all these sonic elements pay clear homage to Gaskin’s Tataskweyak Cree Nation upbringing. But they also illustrate another revelation.

“In R&B and soul music — like, blues singers and musicians — it’s all sort of based upon the pentatonic scale,” explains Gaskin. “In traditional Cree music, that’s really all we sing in, is the pentatonic. I made that connection a few years before I actually made Medicine.”

Prior to this, they had actively excluded all mention of their cultural background from their musical output in an attempt to avoid being pigeonholed as “the DEI hire at festivals.”

“But when I wrote Medicine, I thought to myself, wait, what the hell am I doing? I’m only hindering my flourishment by hiding this part of myself. So, I just put traditional singing on an R&B song, and it happened to work out.”

Eventually, I ask that most clichéd music journalist question: where does the title come from? But it yields unexpected fruit.

“My dad had a lot of kids, both in the States and here in Canada,” Gaskin reveals.

“He was a touring musician in the ’90s. He met my mom at a show, and I was created by a one-night stand, thus becoming a child of love. Although they were never actually like together-together, because he had so many children, he had so many children’s mothers, he had a lot of love to share. I was a product of that.”

LOVECHILD now holds the double meaning of being both an introductory description of the artist as well as the album itself being born as the result of unexpected unions of genre and style.

Standouts on the album include the sultry, bedroom music vibes of Safe, the infectiously danceable beats of the high energy plus sad lyrics pop song Shadows and the carefree, ’80s-synth-wave mood of Cherie Amour.

A highlight is the explosive blues/stomp-clap of Ghost (reminiscent of Rag’n’Bone Man’s 2017 breakout hit, Human), which plays as both a love song and an ode to mental health struggles.

“It’s kind of like a first date, getting to know each other, you know?” Gaskin jokes in reference to having such heavy topics featured on their debut album. “Here’s all my traumas!”

But here also is all the creative DNA that makes up the artist.

The big themes that this album swings at are love, identity, family and mental health. This feels ambitious for a debut album — especially one that almost feels like an exploration of a new genre in each successive track. But the resulting collection succeeds in encompassing these ideas in nuanced, cohesive ways, without feeling disconnected from one another either thematically or genre-wise.

From soulful ballads to ’80s synth-wave dance tracks, from Cree-influenced R&B to guitar-driven pop songs, from explosive bluesy anthems to bittersweet love songs — this album is a tightly woven tapestry of all of Sebastian Gaskin’s musical inspirations and personal explorations coming together to create a brand new offering that is uniquely their own.