New Chance - A Rock Unsteady
We Are Time
Released on May 23rd, 2025
After a four-year gap in between releases, New Chance showcases a new angle to the electronic avant-pop project with her new album A Rock Unsteady released through We Are Time. Victoria Cheong (aka. New Chance) is a Toronto-based musician, vocalist, and astrologer whose conceptual acumen informs the album through intensive research into the Ancient Greek concept of “metakosmios” — a conceptual liminality that literally translates to “in between worlds” or “after worlds / after-worlds” where “kosmios” denotes worlds and the more ambiguous term “meta” denotes anything ranging from “after,” “besides,” “between,” and so on. (I don’t know, man, go ask Aristotle scholars about the debate of the term “metaphysics” used as the title for the book that came after his Physics — have fun with that). It is perhaps that ambiguity that captivates best what A Rock Unsteady is about, an album about collective uncertainty leaning into both the precarity and potentials of the current cosmological landscape of the worlds we inhabit.
The starting track “Doer and Deed”is quite a bold statement, as the album starts out with its longest song sitting at a whopping ten minutes and thirty-two seconds. In spite of how potentially jarring this might be, it suits the track’s sonic and lyrical storytelling. “Doer and Deed” has this masterful melancholic soundscape that evokes a post-apocalyptic longing for all the lost possibilities that have been lost in the shuffle of a saturated modern life, then living with the fact of the matter left behind. This track gets us at the wide-range of New Chance’s sound with minimal soundscapes at times and at others maximalist walls of noise and elements of musique concrète hitting at the point after the lyrics state their thematic piece. The guiding question of modern life continues to be thematized through the context of modern life in the following track “Multiple Storms Seek Attention” which articulates the disorienting pull of all things that urgently call for our attention. The nostalgic wish to return to the way things were before takes the hold of tracks like “Turning Back,” “Original Feeling,” and “Theme Unsteady” — notably with the latter tracks being primarily instrumental with only some passing words reasserting the themes. The music video for the track “Phasis” helps take all of this musical work into dialogue with the form of video, thus taking advantage of the video form to continue to explore the concepts informing the album’s creative practice. The co-direction by New Chance, Johnny Spence, and Cameron Lee orchestrate the visuals to reflect how we navigate modern living as digital and real worlds increasingly blur through the formal limitation of smartphone screens as the enframing of the video. By contrast, the final tracks “Something Human” and “Victory” try to find something steady, grounding, and humanizing through the undifferentiated noise as if to retrieve and make a life affirming difference.
New Chance’s A Rock Unsteady is an ambitious follow up to Real Time (2021), one which is sonically and lyrically attuned to a guiding concept and storytelling that lingers in the shades of gray emerging from worlds in the process of evolution and transformation — formally, it is an achievement to be able to embody such dynamic movements and scenes as music when the very concept changes the notion of fixed form. The sonic, lyrical, and formal congruence of A Rock Unsteady make it an unique listen for those who are invested in high art concept and sound design experimentation. This is an album that would appeal to fans of David Bowie’s Blackstar (2016) or eclectic collaborations like St. Vincent’s and David Byrne’s Love This Giant (2012), as it holds its own strongly among that company of unique albums.
