Michael Brock, the Montreal-based musician who works under the name Mind Bath.Nick Bostick/Supplied
“Those who came before us with futuristic love,” the experimental R&B artist Mind Bath sings on Acid Nine, the softly psychedelic first song of the new album Aqueous. “I’m listening, I’m listening, Oh God I’m listening.”
Mind Bath is listening, but is anybody else? The sublime 10-track effort is a lightly immersive odyssey − a concept album inspired by the singer-songwriter’s debut novel of the same name. In an age of TikTok attention spans and Spotify playlists, a book-based pop opera seems archaic.
“I wanted to create a project that demands a deep listening,” says Michael Brock, the Montreal-based musician who works under the name Mind Bath. “In the world of singles and virality, writing a novel and a concept album is really asking a lot. But the deeper listeners engage, the more they get out of it.”
Deep engagement with music used to be a thing. In the heyday of concept albums, the late 1960s and 1970s, people listened to albums on records and cassettes. There was much less skipping tracks then as there is today − you were committed to a full side of an LP at least.
Artists took advantage of that. The first side of 2112 by the Canadian progressive rock trio Rush was taken up by a 20-minute titular suite that told a sci-fi story. It was an era of indulgent brilliance when ambitious recording artists trusted that their fans had the bandwidth to invest in their ambiguous narratives and fancy musical themes.
Armed with the faith that there was an intelligent audience out there with excellent imaginations (fueled by psychedelic drugs or not), high-minded visionaries took creative risks that paid off with big rewards. Conceptual masterpieces included The Who’s Tommy, David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Pink Floyd’s The Wall and many more.
“That era was experimental,” says veteran Canadian record producer and music publisher Frank Davies, who worked with Klaatu. “Everybody and anybody could do anything. Artists took listeners into all sorts of places and worlds, musically and lyrically, that didn’t exist.”
Mind Bath launches Aqueous at Toronto’s Burdock Music Hall on FridaySara Graorac/Supplied
In a word, the era was radical. And perhaps it is again. Artists, particularly artists on indie labels, are again swinging for the fences. No longer able to make the big money from recordings in the streaming age, musicians are getting long-form freaky.
“Indie labels should encourage experimentation and artistry for their artists who are attempting to break through and hit the big time,” Davies says. “It can result in a devoted following that will pay off when they play live.”
Canadian indie artists in particular are recording concept albums these days. Last year saw the release of Christo Graham’s Clown Riot (based on an actual incident in Toronto in 1855) and Rheostatics’ The Great Lakes Suite (an imaginative double-album that celebrates the Canadian-American freshwater system).
Where concept albums in the golden era tended to slot into the classic rock and prog-rock genres, the 2026 crop of thematic records spreads across various styles. Henry Adam Svec’s The Talbot Trail Boys is a multimedia rural noir album and podcast built around a fictitious alt-country record from the 1990s; Schoonertown, from the alt-folk PEI duo the East Pointers, is about a lobster fisherman; Vancouver symphonic funk-rockers the Living Orchestra bills its Last Generation as a “climate-crisis rock opera sung from the past, present, and future;” and the Polaris Prize-nominated 1783 from Dartmouth-based Aquakultre (a.k.a. Lance Sampson) is a 17-track history of Black Nova Scotia set to modern R&B.
“As a creative medium, the concept album is just as valid in whatever genre an artist happens to be working in,” says Bill Kopp, author of What’s the Big Idea: 30 Great Concept Albums, which delves into everything from the Avett Brothers’ Mignonette to Ghostface Killah and Adrian Younge’s Twelve Reasons to Die. “People still read books, not just X posts. There’s still a market for long form.”
Mind Bath launches Aqueous at Toronto’s Burdock Music Hall on Friday. The album is part autofiction and part hero’s journey, involving an “effervescent stardust boy” who cuts a hole in the sky in search of healing and liberation. Brock’s own journey to the album began at a queer sanctuary in Vermont in 2019.
“It was a life-changing experience that redirected my creative path,” Brock says, speaking on a video call from a cabin in central Ontario. The self-described book worm says he began writing the novel as a joke but it turned into “the biggest mountain of work I’d ever attempted.”
The B.C.-born Brock assembled a band in Ontario’s Muskoka region and read from the book’s first draft as the musicians improvised to the passages. The first song that came together was Dear Friend, Queer Friend, featuring the vocals of a mentor of Brock, the transgender octogenarian and Canadian indie-music icon Beverly Glenn-Copeland.
The album was finished with the help of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. After some early-career success and chasing more of it, Brock has since adjusted his attitude and process.
“You go from being under the thumb of something that isn’t you to feeling, ‘Okay, if I’m not having fun, if I’m not making any money and if I don’t feel this is something that is authentically me, then what is the point of doing this?’ My goal now is to express myself and make art for the rest of my life.”
Top 10 Canadian concept albums
10. The Kennedy Suite, by Cowboy Junkies/Scott Garbe (2013)
9. 1783, by Aquakultre (2026)
8. Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, by Jeremy Dutcher (2018)
7. Music Inspired by the Group of Seven, by Rheostatics (1995)
6. Hope, by Klaatu (1977)
5. Dawn FM, by the Weeknd (2022)
4. Secret Path, by Gord Downie (2016)
3. Canadiana Suite, by Oscar Peterson Trio (1965)
2. Les cinq saisons, by Harmonium (1975)
1. 2112, by Rush (1976)