Consequence’s line on Thea May this week is one of the best artist descriptions I’ve read all year: “a gnarly voice. It’s barbed and raspy and huge.” “High Street,” from her new album Living with It (out October 15 on Ishkōdé Records), is the track that earns every word of it — grungy guitars under a vocal that replays the memories of an ex with total command. “2 hour drive, down highway 69 / Our song came on the radio, i cried the whole time.” Then the hook, devastating in its plainness: “Home was you all along / 621 high street, now I’m sleeping alone.”

The album is May’s reckoning record — her label’s words, and they fit: “a bruised, unfiltered document of what it means to survive without softening the truth.” Staying alive inside discomfort: the wreckage of love, addiction-adjacent coping, inherited pain, and the quiet expectation to be “okay” for everyone else. All seven tracks produced by Illegal Audio (Marc Koecher and Alexandra “Lexie Jay” Jelilyan), mixed by Koecher, mastered in Toronto — lean, live-wire production that keeps her voice dead center.

The context matters as much as the music. May is an Anishinaabe artist from Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, and Ishkōdé Records — ishkōdé means fire in Anishinaabemowin — is the new Indigenous, women-owned label founded by Digging Roots’ Shoshona Kish and Métis artist Amanda Rheaume to amplify Indigenous voices in the commercial music landscape. This is May’s second Ishkōdé release after 2025’s Brought To You By Tragedy EP, and “she is the voice that rock and roll doesn’t know it needs,” as Kish put it when they signed her.

And today is a big day for her beyond this Ten: she joins a host of fellow Indigenous artists at Toronto’s Massey Hall tonight to commemorate ten years of Gord Downie’s The Secret Path, then starts her own Ontario run — Rivoli November 10, London’s Rum Runners November 12, Collingwood November 14, two Sudbury shows November 26–27. Her latest single “Not Okay” is out there too, if “High Street” sends you down the rabbit hole.

No verified artist photo could be sourced for this one, so it goes out without a featured image — a shame, because the music has real presence. The voice does the work anyway. Barbed, raspy, huge. Fall under the spell.

RATING: 4.5/5

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