Culture Reject at 10C Shared Space 2025-09-19T12:00:00
“A Culture Reject performance is a guitar / melody / synth driven emotional dance party laying on a bed of RnB beats”
CANADIAN Culture Reject creates Lo-Fi, Post-Soul music inside Broken Pop songs. While drawing comparisons to Metronomy, SPARKS, Massive Attack, Postal Service, Wings and the “lost soundtrack to a Wes Anderson film” – Culture Reject is a truly original offering. Starting out as the pop experiment of Michael O’Connell in his 120 year old Toronto apartment, Culture Reject released a fresh collection of prose-induced, lo-fi pop songs on Whitewhale Records in 2009. The debut was soon characterized as “epitomizing the boldness of the new Canadian sound.” Much of the attention came from the underground hit Inside the Cinema, which, according to Exclaim is “its own perfect example of irresistible lyrics, phrasing and melodies coming together to form one of the most infectious pop singles of the year”.
Since then, Culture Reject songs have appeared in several short films, documentaries and the television series The Best Years (Netflix/Global). Live performances throughout Canada, the US and Europe (including the Hillside Festival, New York CMW, POP Montreal, Manchester: In The City , France’s Rockomotives and Iceland Airwaves), caught the imagination of French boutique label Specific Recordings. That relationship produced the 2013 “beautiful…sad… melodically unstoppable” (Ma Petite Boite à Musique) FORCES and 2019’s ‘Breaking with the World’ – a collection of lushly constructed, indie pop anthems with a futurist lens, characterized as “beautifully constructed and brilliantly orchestrated” (X-Mist).
Culture Reject lyrically explores themes of power + justice, mental health, the natural world and radical self-care with soundscapes that reflect his move away from Toronto to the wide open spaces found hours north of the city. Between evening swims Culture Reject is crafting invisible work, an intimately explosive, guitar/synth/voice dance party set for release in 2024, with tour dates in UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Spain and Canada to follow.
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