The new album, A Rock Unsteady, by Toronto-based artist and producer Victoria Cheong—aka New Chance—is pure alchemy.
Recently released on her label We Are Time, the musician and vocalist describes this collection of songs as a series of spells. Spells we cast on ourselves. Because we must.
The title A Rock Unsteady conjures a certain little planet—Earth—whose imbalance, corruption, and turmoil have reached a kind of apex. While the album grapples with the collective confusion and horror of existing in this climate, what unfolds is a sprawling, yet piercingly intimate personal journey.
There is no reason
It is not reasonable
We were a part of something
And it was beautiful
We couldn’t figure it out
It was not figurable
The album begins with an impasse. The track, “Doer and Deed,” recalls the vocal experiments of another radical multimedia visionary, Laurie Anderson. Trepidatious beats patter like uncertainly as Cheong meditates on the things we cannot change—the choices we regret, the hopes that persist. What begins in minimalist introspection unfurls into a storm of industrial noise and clatter. “It’s clear down here she has to live with what she’s done.”, she sings.
The path forward is—yes—unsteady.
As the track grows into a kind of devious immensity, a sample from the 1962 cult horror film Carnival of Souls echoes through: a woman, drawn unwillingly toward a sinister force. A similar specter haunts A Rock Unsteady—except here, the terrifying presence is simply life itself, and the journey leads, perhaps, to something hopeful. The destination remains unknown.
What follows is an unflinching work of self-reflection in an age of flaming uncertainty. The artist’s odyssey becomes a descent—an underworld to be crossed in order to survive, or even function, amidst an atmosphere thick with paranoia, grief, and a desperate need for accountability across every stratum of power.
It’s giving conceptual Alice in Wonderland—a twisted journey where the sinister and the sweet entangle in all the strange ways real life demands. “You don’t wanna go down there all alone, do you?” the voice asks. What follows is a personal transformation disguised as an album.
The song becomes a portal. The album, a ritual. The listener? A commune.
At its core, A Rock Unsteady confronts the pressure of navigating personal crisis within a world that offers no direction—a distilled confrontation of uncertainty, rendered in the most hypnotically honest way. This is the big kind of uncertainty—the human kind—heightened by the precarious life of an artist, where rewards are rare and meaning is elusive. It’s a mesmerizing, unsettling experience that gives voice to the ambient confusion we all carry.
We last interviewed New Chance in 2021 following the release of her album Real Time. No stranger to lofty concepts, Real Time dreamily explored the very nature of time. Now, she turns that gaze inward and outward at once.
This is an album of contradictions—one where deep grooves, glitchy production shifts, and dizzying tonal swings create an immersive yet destabilizing experience. But make no mistake: these tracks bop and despite their introspection, would easily find their way to the club. There are real grooves here, complex melodies and production, vast beats, and bewitching textures. This is the world of New Chance: multidimensional, multimedia, and full of overlapping storms demanding care and attention. We’ll get into that.
Filmmaker and artist Kevin Hegge sat down with her to unpack the album, and life’s murkier mysteries—the nature of the unknown, and how it can both employ and consume you. But like… make it fun.
“You don’t wanna go in there all by yourself, do you?” Mary asks in Carnival of Souls. And the answer, dear reader, is: you very much do.
Read the full Q&A with New Chance after the jump!
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