BadBadNotGood On The Art Of Looking Back Without Stopping
Canadian band BadBadNotGood made their name by refusing to sit neatly inside any genre.
They slip between hip hop and jazz in a way that feels less like fusion and more like instinct. Their latest album, their first with XL Recordings, pulls things back inwards. Instead of chasing new textures, they return to something more foundational: instrumental music, their influences, and the history that shaped them in the first place.
The band formed in 2010 at Humber College in Toronto, where Alexander Sowinski, Chester Hansen, and Leland Whitty met through the jazz programme. They quickly veered away from the usual standards, pulling from hip hop and contemporary sounds instead, building a style rooted in Black American music but filtered through their own sensibility.
By Talk Memory, that curiosity had shifted into something more reflective, almost like a direct conversation with the artists who influenced them.
