If you want a snapshot of what Toronto’s heavier scenes sound like when they bleed into each other, Backchannel are a fair place to start.
The five-piece drop “Undercurrent” today — a track that packs two-step parts, breakdowns, anthemic choruses, and heavier passages into one song without any of it feeling like a genre exercise. There’s an early Alexisonfire quality to how it moves between melodic and aggressive, and the clean vocals from Luc Ruggiero lean genuinely melodic rather than just showing up as a breather between screams.
The whole thing was done in-house. Ruggiero and Michael Chiacchia produced, Chiacchia mixed, Mike Kalajian mastered. Writing, artwork — all DIY.
Ruggiero plays rhythm guitar and handles clean vocals. We asked him to talk about where Backchannel sit within Toronto’s broader heavy and alternative world, and he had a lot to say.
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“Toronto’s a huge city, so it feels natural that a lot of genres and niches blend together,” he says. “It’s super common to have friends in bands that range from emo, shoegaze, hardcore punk, metalcore, nostalgic post-hardcore — which is probably closest to what we do — deathcore, straight-up metal, crossover stuff, and everything in between. You’ll often see the same promoters booking different genre nights or mixed bills, and a lot of the same faces showing up to support one another regardless of what style it falls under on a given night.”
The venues tell that story too. Ruggiero names Toronto Style, Houndstooth, Hard Luck Bar, Sneaky Dee’s, and the No-No Room as the rooms where most underground and DIY bands end up rotating through. “Like most big cities, the go-to venues are always changing — opening, closing, relocating — so a lot of the rooms we play now aren’t necessarily the same ones bands were playing a decade ago. But the overall vibe is still very much there.”
What has changed, he says, is access to touring bills. “It doesn’t feel as common anymore for up-and-coming bands like us to open for touring bands. Ten to fifteen years ago it felt a lot more accessible. Back then, more venues were independently owned and there seemed to be more independent promoters bringing bigger tours through the city and giving locals a real chance to hop on those bills.” He points to his own past — in the early 2010s, one of his previous bands opened for Story of the Year without too much effort. “Now that Live Nation owns most of the larger venues and controls most of the touring traffic, locals don’t seem to factor in as much — or at least not the way I remember.”
The trade-off, according to Ruggiero, is that local bills have gotten stronger. “If you promote properly, show up consistently, and build real connections with people and other bands, people come out. There’s something appealing about being able to spend a reasonable amount on a ticket and still get to dance, mosh, and experience genuinely sick heavy bands.”
Backchannel are still under a year into playing shows, but they think regionally. Driving a couple hours in any direction to play is standard. “Not just Toronto but Ontario as a whole feels like it’s popping off right now,” he says. “It’s very common here to think regionally rather than just locally, so we — and a lot of our peers — aren’t limiting ourselves to Toronto shows alone.”
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Their sound reflects that open-borders approach. Ruggiero describes “Undercurrent” — which the band considers their strongest stuff to date — pretty directly: “It really reflects how we don’t think much about genre boundaries. There are two-step parts, breakdowns, big anthemic choruses, and heavier moments all living in the same song because that’s just what feels natural to us. It’s punky, it’s heavy, and in a weird way it feels very Toronto — pulling from a bunch of different corners of the scene without locking into just one lane.”
“Undercurrent” is out now via all major platforms — for fans of Better Lovers, Underoath, and Alexisonfire.
