Debt Shop Boi

A Toronto-based left synthpop–industrial–darkwave–electropunk artist, Debt Shop Boi spins many origin stories. One begins in Brooklyn, where demsoc baristas dreamed of becoming the next Daft Punk or LCD Soundsystem, until precarity crushed them. Another starts in Toronto or Montreal, as grad students, living in a co-op while reading operaismo and listening to Ministry, Crystal Castles, TR/ST, and Youth Code. Yet another imagines Midwestern folk revivalists trying to channel Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs through a darkwave filter while dancing to punk and post-punk songs by the Idles, Sleaford Mods, Model/Actriz, and Lambrini Girls. Another claims they were once part of a Berlin-based David Bowie cover band obsessed with "I'm Deranged" and "I'm Afraid of Americans," before reassembling to protest tech fascism. Even another casts them as a jaded Gen X knowledge worker in London who listens to The Clash, Dead Kennedys, MDC, Pet Shop Boys, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Bjork, and Fever Ray, to cope with alienation. Debt Shop Boi is less a fixed identity than a cast of agonistic subjects under capitalism, each one struggling, and failing, to be free. DSB's tiny protest songs are manic coping devices laced with quotes by artists, philosophers, and activists, a dance between hope and despair, resistance and resignation, fascism and revolt.