Dinah – Dinah!

Throughout her life, Toronto-based Dinah Thorpe has been the singing jock–a polymath possessing two talents that others sought to set at odds. A gentle giant and keen basketball player, Dinah was kicked out of her school’s choir when she was young, told by her teachers that she wasn’t able to occupy both spaces. It’s only now–deep into her career as a musician–that Dinah realized just how wrong they were.

Dinah’s musical universe is home to both the emotional and the physical. “I put sad words inside of bangers,” she says, her smoky alto the essence of the visceral and melodic. With it, she weaves together politics, interpersonal relationships, and the natural world into music that itches and pulsates.

Today she announces her sixth album, Dinah!, set for a self-release on February 23rd.

Written and recorded during the pandemic, the 17 songs on Dinah! are short and intense: taut with tender tension, pain and restraint, the sound of a jock trying to stifle her tears midway through a game.

She shares the first album single today called “Winter Black Lake,” which captures a sense of propulsion that stops and starts, with Dinah relying on her own sense of timing before her voice is offered up to a driving beat. Think: Laurie Anderson, Xiu Xiu, Bowie, Dirty Projectors.

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