Devours Navigates Queer Identity with Empowering Purpose on'Sports Car Era'
Sports Car Era confronts the topics of queerness, aging, and struggling in the Vancouver music scene, on top of a well-crafted, of-the-moment electronic sound. Jeff Cancade, under their Devours moniker, produced the album DIY-style with mastering from Vancouver engineer Brock McFarlane.
“It kind of feels like ego death every time I release music. It's so personal, I make it by myself, and I sit on it for so long…,” says Devours.
The album blends aughts electroclash with indie sleaze but, rather than just sounding ‘like’ those genres, it’s infused with enough hyperpop rhythm and synth noise to have its own sound. When listened to sequentially, Sports Car Era has great pacing and variety in its production; Songs build up into each other, reprieve, and repeat; tones shift seamlessly from serious to tongue-in-cheek between songs and within them. Devours experiments and still achieves incredible balance.
“A lot of the time signatures, you know, I wanted to push myself a bit,” says Devours. “I wanted to have a song like ‘Swordswallower’, that's seven and a half minute song and has some doom metal energy in it, and then a few of the other songs that just break into other songs halfway through and have three choruses.”
‘Swordswallower.’ though an extended listen, is a capsule of the album and is one of Devours’ points of pride. Its sparse lyrics, particularly the chorus “I’m falling apart again,” are a sum of the overall theme of the album. The track's production is an immensely theatrical exercise; it builds, reprieves, and repeats just as the album does. ‘Swordswallower’ is Sports Car Era’s inciting incident.
“I'm really proud of Swordswallower. I'll write a song on a piano, and I'll have an idea of how I want it to sound recorded, but I don't like my voice that much, and I often just can't quite capture it in a recording,” says Devours. “Swordswallower actually worked. It's a huge, ambitious song that actually did what I wanted it to in the recorded version of it.”
Listening to Sports Car Era leads one to think of Devours as the project of an eclectic synthesizer-smith DJ-producer, however, Cancade approaches the project of Devours as a singer-songwriter first. Cancade spends their day-to-day life thinking of lyrics. After enough bike rides to the grocery store, they get to their piano and start songwriting acoustically before going electronic. This process lends to the great lyricism and writing at play in Sports Car Era.
“It's always been a lyrics first project,” says Devours. “It's about the agony and ecstasy of contemporary gay culture.”
As the name suggests, the heart of Sports Car Era is the male-coded mid-life crisis as seen through Devours’ queer indie-music scene eyes. ‘Canada’s Next Top Fat Otter’ is a great showcase track for the album. The breakup song has this playful veneer in its self-deprecation and pettiness towards their ex, but it reveals itself as a tragic reflection on how those traits imply an insecurity that dooms relationships. The album is full of clever interplay between shallow sufferings and their deeper relevance.
“Every album that I put out is a time capsule of the stuff that's going on in my life at the time,” says Devours. “With this one, it's struggling to find employment, struggling to find my purpose in a community where there's not a lot of, aging, gay, outspoken musicians who are 40, trying to find my place again and reintegrate into a world that seems I got squeezed out of.”
Personally, Sports Car Era landed me with the thought that, despite how queer-centric many of this album’s sound neighbours are, we never really hear from the otter community. While queer gender-diverse people aren’t known to get divorces and buy Porsches, there is still crisis to be had. This album gives voice to that perspective as Devours decries gay masculinity worship awash in electronica.
“Devours has always been an exploration of my gender identity. Esthetically, I've always wanted it to land somewhere between masculine and feminine,” says Cancade. “That was a tricky thing when I was coming up with the art direction. I was like, ‘should I get a sports car picture and wear a blazer?’ … The album cover is meant to be defiant, ‘here is me in a bodysuit… This is who I am, take me or leave me.”
Sports Car Era is out everywhere now. Catch Devours performing with Juno Fest on March 28, 2025 at The Birdhouse and stream the new album down below.