In an era where online momentum can turn an artist into a phenomenon almost overnight, ThxSoMch has emerged as one of the more unpredictable voices to come out of Canada’s new underground wave. His music moves between abrasion and vulnerability, pairing distorted textures with melodies that feel exposed enough to fracture. Songs like “Hate.” and “Spit In My Face!” spread rapidly online, but the attention surrounding them has also forced him to navigate the tension between instinctive creativity and the expectations that come with virality.
What makes ThxSoMch compelling is the resistance built into his approach. Even as his audience expands, he remains skeptical of polish, algorithmic thinking, and the pressure to endlessly recreate past success. In conversation, he speaks candidly about protecting the rawness in his work, preserving imperfect vocal takes, and finding ways to separate artistic expression from the business demands surrounding it.
The result is music that often feels immediate and chaotic, but grounded in emotions that linger long after the initial impact.
You had a breakout moment online that connected quickly and intensely. How did that experience shape the way you approach making and releasing music?
I try not to let it affect the way I make music. “Intense” is the best way to describe it, because at first the rush of attention and pressure was overwhelming, and it would influence the creative. It still does sometimes, but I try to block it out and create as myself.
Releasing music is different, because then you have to think about marketing and everything around it. I learned a lot early on in that sense. But my favourite part of releasing has always been the fans.
Some of your songs feel very immediate, like they capture a moment as it’s happening. How do you balance that urgency with refinement?
Most of what I write about is from past stories. There isn’t always immediacy in telling them, because they’re about a feeling, and you don’t forget feelings.
Some songs are about things I’m going through in the moment, almost like I’m venting them out. Those come naturally too. In my experience, both can make equally good songs.
When a certain energy resonates with people, there can be pressure to recreate it. How do you avoid falling into repetition?
You do or you don’t, and you let it drive you mad. I remember my A&R once texting me, “You need to constantly emulate ‘Hate’ and ‘Spit,’” which are my two biggest songs. No surprise there.
But I think it comes down to finding time to create for yourself, not just for your business.
Your work exists in a space that’s both highly digital and very visceral. How do you think about the relationship between online momentum and real-world impact?
Touring is definitely important for that. But it’s hard to draw the line sometimes. I know artists with real fanbases who have never toured or even shown their face. Maybe it just comes down to the music and the message.
As your audience grows, there’s often a push toward a more polished sound. What are you most intentional about preserving in your music?
Polished sound is for AI music. Preserving mistakes and raw moments is important. It makes the music more real. I’ve lost my voice recording songs to the point where I couldn’t even hit the notes, and some of those takes are still in my songs.
When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you want them to feel?
Scared. Or at peace.
A lot of music now is designed for instant impact. Do you see your work as something that hits right away, or something that reveals more over time?
It depends on the song. With my album, I feel like it’ll slowly reach people over time. With singles, it can be a bit of both.
I don’t really think about that while I’m creating, and once it’s out, I try not to think about it. You can only hope at the end of the day.
What are your thoughts on the future of music in Canada?
There seems to be a nice scene coming up in Toronto right now, especially in underground music. It feels like the strongest it’s been in that sense. Every year I see more and more Canadian artists winning, and that feels good.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?