Montreal-based artist Quinton Barnes has shared details of his album, BLACK NOISE, set for release on June 6th via Watch That Ends The Night. Alongside the announcement, Barnes shares the album’s first single, ‘Movement 7‘,’ a strikingly confessional, raw and heartbreaking introduction to his most sonically ambitious and conceptually expansive work to date.
A fusion of rapping and singing over an untouched, classical piano piece by Edward Enman. Initially resistant to writing a ballad, Barnes ultimately embraced the challenge, pushing his vocal delivery into uncharted territory. The track builds through layers of live ensemble performance, recorded over multiple takes to capture the perfect, natural arc of tension and release.
Set to be the third album of his 27th year, and slated to be released on his 28th Birthday BLACK NOISE follows January 2025’s CODE NOIR and August 2024’s HAVE MERCY ON ME, each album exploring different facets of experimental music. Where CODE NOIR celebrated his Black and queer identity through a collision of club music, hyperpop, and R&B, and HAVE MERCY ON ME ventured into raw, confessional songwriting, BLACK NOISE expands into new dimensions of sonic exploration, interrogating the role of Black sound in an inherently anti-Black world.
Recorded at Montreal’s legendary Hotel2Tango studios, BLACK NOISE marks a stark departure from Barnes’ previous DIY production approach, embracing a highly collaborative process. Produced by esteemed Ontario producer Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions, formerly The Burning Hell), the album builds its intricate, chaotic arrangements from a foundation of Eurocentric classical piano compositions by pianist Edward Enman, which Barnes and his ensemble then deconstructed and reassembled into something wholly new.
The album features a cast of some of Montreal’s most daring experimental musicians, including members of Egyptian Cotton Arkestra (James Goddard, Markus Lake, Ari Swan, and Lucas Huang), exploratory multi-instrumentalist Matt LeGroulx, avant-garde reedist Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and noise producer Ky Brooks. Together, they explore an expansive sound that merges noise, hip-hop, breakbeat, avant-jazz, drone, and footwork, supporting Barnes’ poetic, nihilistic sprechgesang.
Speaking on the single Barnes said: “MOVEMENT 7 is as political as it is personal for me – I wrote it while in the depths of precarity, attempting to encapsulate all the tension, frustration, heartbreak and uncertainty that felt so potent at the time, and in many ways still does. I wanted to push against the conventional neoclassical piano piece with a more modern and disruptive hip-hop vocal style. Despite my initial resistance to writing a ballad, out of it came what feels like one of my most heartfelt works, something that cuts through all the pretence and lays it all bare”.
Lyrically, BLACK NOISE examines overlooked Black genius, the precarity of poverty, grief, and the tension between destruction and creation. Written in the wake of Trump’s re-election, the album engages with themes of Afro-pessimism and resistance, while pushing boundaries of sound and storytelling.
Quinton Barnes is a relentlessly ambitious Montreal-based artist exploring the edges of Canada’s music scene. Since 2018, he’s built a unique sound, writing, rapping, singing, producing, mixing, and mastering his own work across a prolific discography. For his new album, Black Noise, produced by Michael Cloud Duguay (Scions), releasing June 6 on Watch That Ends The Night Records, Barnes took an assuredly different approach than with his past work, resulting in a release that, while in staunch keeping with his radically innovate methods of expression, presents a bold sonic evolution and showcases the talents and efforts of a diverse collective of Montreal-based artists and musicians in collaboration.
With funding from The Canada Council for the Arts, the ensemble assembled in Montreal in November, 2024, just days after the re-election of Donald Trump in America. With the spectre of explicit fascism casting a tense shadow over the sessions, the collective came together every day for a week, using the manipulated piano suite recordings as a guide to improvisation and spontaneous composition. Collaboratively exploring different iterations of ‘noise’ through the lens of Barnes’ Black Noise theories and Duguay’s tightly conceptualized creative process, Black Noise coalesced piece by piece.
Black Noise will be released on June 6, 2025, on Watch That Ends The Night Records, and the ensemble will be performing at a series of showcases at summer music festivals across Canada.
