Jeff Cancade is feeling hopeful these days. There are a few reasons. First, the Vancouver-based artist known for the experimental electronic music projects Devours and the Golden Age of Wrestling has a new album out—Sweet Chin Music, under the latter moniker. It’s an excellent album, and Cancade (who uses they/them pronouns) is proud of it. They also were recently certified as a career counsellor, a fitting role for someone so well versed in the business of independent musicianship. And since turning 40, Cancade is over caring what anybody thinks.
Creatively, it’s been a prolific few years for Cancade. As Devours, they released Homecoming Queen in 2023, which was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize, and Sports Car Era in 2025. The last Golden Age of Wrestling album, Scorpion Deathlock, came in between in 2024. The work has been a way for Cancade to navigate all that’s come up during that time: reassessing what “middle age” means, feeling aged out of a scene that rewards youth, struggling with underemployment.
Photo by Jeff Cancade.
There was a lot of depression and anxiety behind the process, Cancade admits. It showed up in the music, too: Sports Car Era was “easily the darkest album I’ve ever written in my life,” while Scorpion Deathlock exuded an iciness as an artistic statement to counter any commercialism tied to being released on Intraset, 604 Records’ electronic imprint. But, Cancade says, “Sweet Chin Music is probably the most colourful and hopeful Golden Age album that I’ve made—and I really needed to make it.”
Making music has been a therapy for Cancade since they were a teenager growing up in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Music has always been important. Enduring inspiration was found in places such as Timbaland’s innovative production, Enigma (the electronic music outfit behind the Pure Moods classics “Return to Innocence” and “Sadeness (Part 1)”), and David Wise’s atmospheric soundtrack to Donkey Kong Country—which, with its ambient passages, Cancade says “changed my life.”
Photo by Cancade.
The two personas, Devours and the Golden Age of Wrestling, offer Cancade distinct channels for self-expression. Every detail is meticulously considered. There’s Devours, the synth-pop “gaylien” alter ego, seen in a spiky headpiece and sparkle-accented outfits. “Devours is so ambitious,” Cancade says about the project. “It’s so about personal statements and ‘this is who I am, and these are my big ideas of what the world is.'” The Golden Age of Wrestling, on the other hand, depicted as a glamorous wrestler whose likeness is hidden by a glittering golden cover, with a personality Cancade calls cocky and antagonistic, is a little different.
“I think that, [with] Devours, I’ve had to be so… nice,” Cancade considers. “I think that that’s the perception, that I’m a nice person in the music scene. And I don’t think it’s entirely wrong. But also, Vancouver is a city where it’s fairly big, but it’s not that big. It’s all about your reputation. And with the Golden Age of Wrestling, it gives me a chance to sort of play a villainous [character], tap into this side of me that gets to be brutally honest.”
The mostly instrumental music, in contrast to the character’s brash exterior, is ambient and evocative, drawing on many of the sonic references that soundtracked Cancade’s early life. The boisterous wrestler is really a sensitive soul who’s misunderstood. Cancade wanted to put a big personality to a style of music that can often be faceless, and this particular project, they explain, is very emotional—reflecting on the smaller things in life and meant to conjure a childlike mood.
Nostalgia is a prominent theme across Sweet Chin Music. “Adulthood is hard,” Cancade says. “I sometimes get nostalgic. I think that it comes from the pressures of adulthood and wanting to escape to a simpler time when I was younger.” Like many millennials, Cancade grew up with certain societal expectations of midlife—one steady career, kids—that don’t reflect the trajectory they’re actually on now in their 40s. But “I think that all I can do as a musician at 40 is, instead of having things turn into insecurities, I need to be strong, and I need to turn everything into self-empowerment.”
Photo by Colin Janz.
There’s a line on the opening track, the piano ballad “Understudy,” that goes, “I do not know who I am, yet I desperately want self definition.” It speaks to how we’re constantly redefining ourselves through our lives, Cancade explains. “Every time I think that I know who I am, some new layer of the onion is revealed, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s not who I thought I was.’ It’s constantly changing, you know?”
Many of the other songs on Sweet Chin Music ruminate on male friendship. It wasn’t intentional. It’s just been on Cancade’s mind lately: masculinity, what it’s like to be a man, what it’s like to be a gay man. “There is a certain mystique and beauty to male bonding,” Cancade notes. “Lifetime Bereavement Award” mourns a lost friendship. “Friendship Cove” name checks the DIY music venue in Montreal that Cancade used to frequent when they lived there but which doesn’t exist anymore. At the end of the song, Cancade sings about a repaired friendship as they bike home through the Mile End neighbourhood. Friendship is beautifully illustrated across the Golden Age music videos, too—two skateboarders cheer each other on as they glide across the cement in “Revenge Body (Denton, Tx).” In “Map to the Stars,” about childhood friendships, boys with busted lips and bloody knuckles fight, play, and hang out.
The music is ethereal and wistful, more full-bodied than previous Golden Age albums. This kind of composition is a true strength of Cancade’s. Along the sonic landscape are signs of an analog youth: the ticking of bicycle wheels, record scratching, what sounds like a cassette being fast-forwarded, interrupting delicate keys and sublime “oohs” (courtesy of Eschoir community pop choir director Joel Gomez, featured throughout the album) on “Understudy.” Cancade dug up the samples from the internet and royalty-free sources (none of it artificial intelligence, for the record). Sweet Chin Music evokes a feeling, world-building in the tradition of video game soundtracks and film scores that transport you. Thomas Newman, the composer behind American Beauty, and one of Cancade’s favourite contemporary composers, was another big influence.
Photo by Cancade.
Cancade is releasing Sweet Chin Music independently on their own label, surviving the game. “I have a DIY spirit, and I want to just do things myself,” they say. Cancade has historically done it all, anyway: the marketing, promotion, booking. They’ve had to learn how to do everything a label does.
It’s been a benefit, Cancade insists. “I think that’s the reason why, after a decade now, I’m still doing this stuff. I’m not a megastar or anything, but I still have momentum, I still get show offers, and it’s because I’ve had to learn the things that every musician ultimately needs to learn. We’re all business owners.” Artists want to be artists, they continue, but the business aspect is crucial to stay afloat. “That’s why I’m still surviving. That’s what surviving the game is.”
Plus, fame is fleeting. Cancade has come to understand that “all that matters is community”: the young musicians who reach out for business advice, the people who come to shows, the ones who approach Cancade afterward to share how the music has helped them figure out their identity or get over a breakup. “I’m really grateful,” Cancade says. “I’m proud of myself for being strong enough in my lyrics and music to sing about what I’ve actually been going through.
“There’s so much pressure to get your numbers up and to have this smoke and mirrors illusion of big fame or whatever, have a big career. But nothing matters nearly as much when you actually stand for something, and you can speak to someone through your music.”
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