Twelve years have passed since Tanya Tagaq took a sledgehammer to the polite veneer of the Canadian music industry, winning the Polaris Music Prize and a Juno for Animism while forcing the mainstream to look unblinkingly at the nation’s mistreatment of its Indigenous people. In the intervening decade, the Inuk throat singer has expanded her reach across multiple platforms, becoming a cultural powerhouse whose voice has been sought out by HBO for True Detective, utilised in a Mission Impossible theme, and cemented in literature. Yet, as colonial powers continue to carve up the Arctic, eyeing the resources of a land inhabited overwhelmingly by Inuit communities, Tagaq’s fury has only calcified. Saputjiji, which translates from Inuktitut to ‘designated protector’, arrives as a distress signal and a declaration of war. It is a record aimed squarely at the jugular of the modern military-industrial-capitalist machine, vibrating with the kind of localised grief that inevitably bleeds into global catastrophe.
Produced by Sumach and Jean Martin, the album throws the listeners down the stairs. Opening track ‘Fuck War’ is an immediate, full-throttle assault of metallic drums and a prickly, lurching bass line over which Tagaq unleashes a series of blood-curdling screams. It is a paroxysm of rage that makes the average contemporary protest song sound like a polite suggestion. This sheer industrial grind spills over into ‘Foxtrot’, where Tagaq trades howls with Fucked Up’s Damien Abraham. The collaboration is an exercise in dystopian brutalism, conjuring images of ravaged cities and toxic air. They sound less like musicians recording in a studio and more like the last two people on earth screaming over the roar of falling bombs. Tagaq’s mastery of katajjaq, the Inuit throat singing tradition, has always been her most potent weapon, but here she contorts it into shapes that are violently abrasive, sounding at times like a machine chewing on its own gears.
What makes Saputjiji so utterly devastating is the terrifying quiet that follows after the noise. For an artist known for her ferocity, the most shocking moments on this record are disarmingly gentle. Tagaq slows the tempo to address the horrific suicide epidemic plaguing Inuit youth in Nunavut, a crisis where the statistics are so grim they defy comprehension. ‘When They Call’ is a heavy, string-infused elegy that trades industrial terror for a staggeringly sweet, almost girlish vocal delivery. As she begs, “Don’t go / Though I know it hurts inside,” surrounded by echoey drums and reverb-soaked strings, the song swells with a post-rock grandiosity that shatters the heart completely. It is followed by ‘Exit Wound’, a stark, haunted piano ballad that feels spiritually indebted to the bleakest corners of the Nick Cave catalogue. Tagaq ruminates on the cold mechanics of a bullet and the sudden, irreversible vacuum of death, accompanied by electronic glitches that flutter in the mix like failing heart monitors.
The lyrical structure of the album leans heavily on fragments from Tagaq’s acclaimed 2018 book Split Tooth, which is currently being adapted for the stage and intertwined with this very music, but the words are entirely recontextualised by the claustrophobic production. On the militaristic death march of ‘Razorblades’, she speaks, “I accidentally sliced you way too deep,” her spoken-word delivery tangled in sinewy vocalizations and glitchy instability. Elsewhere, Saputjiji frequently descends into nightmare logic, daring the listener to look away. ‘Lichens’ warps a demented music box melody around a sultry, deeply unsettling vocal performance that feels hypnotic and dangerous, while ‘Expensive Plane Tickets’ traps a decaying electronic loop in what sounds like a vat of battery acid. Even when the album touches on the physical body, as on the sinister, heavy-breathing drone of ‘Black Boot’ or the panic-attack intensity of the febrile ‘Bohica’, it feels like flesh being subjected to extreme, unnatural pressure. She issues a stark challenge on ‘Ikualajut’, reminding us that a collective shift in consciousness is required before the sunflowers burn, delivering a biting indictment of those who find safety in numbers while dictating who actually gets to count.
By the time the album reaches its peak with closer, ‘Imiq’, the smoke begins to clear. Tagaq slips into a mesmerizing vocal rhythm that flashes across the stereo field, supported by the wail of distorted electric guitar feedback echoing from the abyss. It embodies a vast, anxious infinity, a reminder of the sheer scale of the natural world that tech-billionaires and colonial land-grabbers are so desperate to own and destroy. Saputjiji is a profoundly uncomfortable and rigid listen, stripped of easy melodies and devoid of false hope. As the world burns and machineries grind louder, Tagaq refuses to offer us the comfort of pausing, reducing the volumes or looking away. She has built a towering work out of static, grief and unyielding resistance, proving once again that she is one of the most vital, terrifyingly brilliant artists operating in Canada today.
