For nearly a decade, Dust Cwaine has been commanding stages across Western Canada with their signature high-voltage musical drag experiences. Whether as a performer themselves or the masterminding curator behind three drag musicals, bi-weekly performances of burgeoning drag artists, or the producer of shows featuring the well-established talents of Rupaul’s Drag Race alumni, Dust has established themselves as one of the premier voices of the electric Canadian drag scene.

In 2020, after collaborating with John Eastman of Helm Studies, their debut LP Arcana was released to acclaim from the likes of The Jann Arden Podcast on iHeartRadio, Exclaim!, and the Georgia Straight. Just as easy to sing along to as it is to dwell in and meditate on, Arcana marks a confident and assured arrival of a distinct voice in this compendium of what they would refer to as nostalgia pop navel gazing for grown theatre kids. In 2023, Dust released their EP 17, compounding all the differing limits of their sound into a lush top-down, blast-out-the windows, angst-ridden alt-rock catharsis. Dust’s music is a uniquely vulnerable look at an artist establishing their own universe of narratives, symbols, and personality. At its heart is the story of Dust-the-Child in their inner world, the seventeen year old they couldn’t be, and the artist they’ve become.

But as the leader of Dust Cwaine and the River Children, we find a starkly different side of them. A soulful equal-parts pitch of 90s alternative and contemporary indie-rock, Dust’s songwriting project pushes them into a new spotlight, one that’s intimate, delicate, and personal with all the troubadouring sensibilities of Billy Brag and Alex Cameron and room for the live-wire classic rock and roll outbursts of Alanis Morisette and HAIM. With a tender sense of humour to guide them, Dust’s identity comes into focus out of their anthemic ballads of sexuality, fatness, and sacrifice and their tender melodies of divination, friendship, aromanticism and satisfaction. Their music is nostalgia pop naval gazing for grown theatre kids, just as easy to sing along to as it is to dwell in and meditate on. Powered by bursts of choral refrains and buzzing synthesizers, Dust the songwriter emerges in a lush top-down, blast-out-the-windows, angst-ridden alt-rock catharsis.