After sounding the “Alarm Bells” and vowing to give up drinking in his last single, Alliston, Ontario’s Grant Boyer returns with something dark and thought-provoking: “De-Evolution.” Check it out on YouTube here:

Does that title remind you of ‘80s icons Devo? It might, with its theme of societal regression wrapped up in a catchy chorus:
De-evolution is here, and we don’t care
Shove my face in a phone and
You can take me anywhere.

But this track’s purely of this century, with its creeping-menace hook that reflects what Boyer calls “the general sense of unease that we crave” and its “online arguments [that] go nowhere.” It was originally intended to be acoustic, until the addition of brain-crunching riffs, scraping rhythm, and a jolting solo gave the track a powerful new edge.

In “De-Evolution,” the unease Boyer mentions comes to roaring life: a world careening toward everywhere and nowhere, propelled by apathy, ignorance, and the constant presence of social media on our smarter and smarter phones. When the lyric’s focus switches from me and my to you and your, Boyer implies that no one’s really safe. So, how do we fight back?

Listen on Spotify here: open.spotify.com/track/2okuRJp5jORQ3pZdKXVTKx?si=b54ba505f7f84b9e&nd=1

“We’re not trying to change the world,” he asserts, “but if we can make you think for just a sec, maybe that’s ok.”
And in the back of your mind, you might even wonder: Who’s in charge of the almighty screen?

Grant Boyer is a founding member of Canadian hard rockers Golden Gate Graves, who released five albums over the 2010s and shared stages with major bands such as April Wine, USS, Big Wreck, and Trooper. As a genre-blending solo act, he’s toured Canada with Honeymoon Suite, the Sheepdogs, and others, fronting members of the Trailer Park Boys.

More new music will be available this winter.