Jane Inc: A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH

Carlyn Bezic has never been afraid to turn her own metamorphoses into dance music. When her solo project Jane Inc. emerged from the locked-down quiet of 2021, it felt like both a pressure release and a declaration of independence—a Toronto indie veteran carving out a space for maximalism, curiosity, and art-pop pleasure in a world that had all but stopped moving. Across Number One and Faster Than I Can Take, she spun existential panic into disco liberation, like a DIY Madonna raised on post-punk and late-night philosophy podcasts. But where those records felt like Bezic learning how to breathe again, A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH is what happens when she’s forced to fight for that breath.

The catalyst was real and terrifying. In April 2023, Bezic was touring with U.S. Girls when a semi-truck collided with the band’s van on a Massachusetts highway. Everyone survived, but the shock reverberated through the rest of her year: a breakup, surgery to remove a cancerous growth from her vocal cord, and a confrontation with mortality that stripped away whatever emotional safety nets were left. The result isn’t just another “I survived” record—it’s a document of what happens after survival, when you have to figure out what to do with the borrowed time. “My heart’s beating out of my chest,” she sings on the title track, her voice both steadied and trembling. “Reborn on the dancefloor.” It sounds less like a metaphor than a field report from resurrection itself.

Produced with longtime collaborator Edwin de Goeij, A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH is Bezic’s most confident fusion of body and mind, a record that swaps indie reflexiveness for full-bodied ecstasy. “reborn (on the dancefloor)” is classic piano-house rapture—spiritual sweat music where euphoria and terror trade places with every downbeat. “elastic” glides in behind it like a mirrorball apparition, channeling Moroder’s shimmer and phrasing intimacy as performance art: “I want you and your thousands of eyes, making me new.” For an artist who once approached self-expression like a thesis, it’s thrilling to hear her lean so fully into sensation.

The centerpiece, “what if,” stretches that energy into a seven-minute techno sermon. It begins like an anxious inner monologue in the vein of Marie Davidson before bursting into a jubilant house anthem. When Bezic chants “I! Want! More!” it lands somewhere between self-help mantra and primal scream. Even when the BPM dips, the songs stay kinetic. “freefall” recalls Sophie B. Hawkins’ wind-in-your-hair pop catharsis, while “i’m alive!!!” earns its exclamation marks by bouncing between Bowie-style funk and millennial self-affirmation. These moments aren’t just survival anthems—they’re dispatches from the fragile, funny, euphoric mess of keeping going.

Still, Bezic knows that transcendence always leaves a bruise. “keeping it with me” is the quietest, most gutting song she’s ever written—a breakup ballad suspended between nostalgia and surrender. Over warm Wurlitzer chords and a restless drum shuffle, she weighs what to save and what to let die, her voice hovering like static in a fading photograph. The closing track, “drumheller,” turns that ache into acceptance. Over a dusky, Stereolab-like pulse, she recounts her cancer diagnosis, then exhales: “Take a chance, baby / Come on, let’s take a chance.” The line lands like a mission statement for the record itself—fearful, defiant, free.

A RUPTURE A CANYON A BIRTH is the sound of someone reintroducing herself to her own heartbeat, of an artist who’s learned that self-reinvention isn’t a project but a pulse. Bezic has always made smart, stylish pop about the world closing in; this time, she lets the walls crumble, steps into the wreckage, and dances