Jane Inc. – A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH
Jane Inc.—the solo project of Toronto-based musician Carlyn Bezic (U.S. Girls, Ice Cream)—announces her new album, A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH, out October 17th via Telephone Explosion Records, and releases its lead single/video, “elastic.”
A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH has a pulse rendered by the insistent self-possession that comes from being repeatedly and forcibly reminded of your own mortality. Written in the aftermath of a car accident, a vocal cord cancer diagnosis, and a breakup, it presents a journey about fragility, mortality, chance, clarity through collapse, and the erotic energy that can come in moments of deep stabilization. The more esoteric art-pop of Jane Inc. records past—2021’s Number One and 2022’s Faster Than I Can Make—has given itself over to a beat-forward, ‘80s disco shimmer because it had to; Bezic’s only way through this was across the surface of a dancefloor and a stage.
In a way, A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH was born in April 2023 on a stretch of Massachusetts highway, when a semi-truck slammed into the broken-down tour van holding Bezic and five other musicians. Somewhat miraculously, no one died. While waiting in the tow lot, Bezic and her tourmates, battered but vibrating with adrenaline, decided the show must go on. For the rest of that tour opening for U.S. Girls, she performed with newfound abandon. In a single, shattering instant, she’d catapulted past some spiritual point of no return. It wouldn’t be the last.
Bezic returned home, broke off her relationship of nearly a decade, and decided to see a doctor about a persistent raspiness in her voice that didn’t seem to be improving. Exactly a year and a day after the crash, she was diagnosed with stage one cancer on her left vocal cord. By the end of that summer she’d undergone two successful surgeries that left her voice intact, but came with a serious caveat: there is a significant possibility of regrowth, and close monitoring is essential. Inspired by these life altering events, A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH reminds us that whatever holds our lives together is under no obligation to remain solid. There are no guarantees.
So what is a girl to do with a near-death experience? Not dying was the easy part. The rupture, the canyon, and the (re)birth was the real work. Produced by Bezic and Edwin de Goeij (U.S. Girls, Martha Wainwright), A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH is a synth-pop record with its own interior momentum. Today’s single, “elastic,” “was inspired by performing in the aftermath of the car accident,” Bezic explains. “The experience unlocked something for me, and I felt I could perform with more freedom and abandon than ever before. Here I imagine the audience as a lover, and under their gaze, life is filled with pure Dionysian possibility: an unrolling and malleable series of nows.”
Of the song’s accompanying video, Bezic comments: “They say a song is a fixed number of minutes and seconds but it never feels that way. Had to make this video to prove it.”
A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH is a concept album the same way death is a concept until it’s hurtling toward you at 65 MPH, or the way love is a concept until one day it takes the exact shape of someone else’s hands. Bezic is often singing about the loftiest of subjects, but losing yourself in the wordless physical ecstasy of the beat is the point.
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