Ribbon Skirt - PENSACOLA
Mint Records
Released on October 3rd, 2025
I love a victory lap. There is nothing like watching someone get to bask in their achievements, especially when it is done as artistically as the achievement itself. This is why Ribbon Skirt’s PENSACOLA EP has been a much anticipated follow up to their debut album Bite Down (2025).
If you haven’t been keeping up with Ribbon Skirt, you have some serious stuff to get up to speed on. The Montreal-based act is a shoegaze/moccasin-gaze band led by Anishinaabe musician Tashiina Buswa and guitarist Billy Riley. Originally founded as Love Language, the act was renamed Ribbon Skirt in a manner that emphasizes the deep seeded Anishinaabe outlook guiding the musical approach to relationality of life at large while resisting the traumatising severing effects of colonialism.
Earlier in 2025, Ribbon Skirt debuted with Bite Down through Mint Records. Since, the album exploded in popularity and critical praise across the board with coverage from Pitchfork, Stereogum, Rolling Stone, NPR, Exclaim! Magazine, and CBC. The album was shortlisted for the 2025 Polaris Music Award and it was listed as Stereogum’s Album of the Week. Since its release, Ribbon Skirt has been touring across Canada and the United States, at times touring with Cola and Wombo and at others featuring at festivals like Sled Island, POP Montreal, and Winterruption YEG. Shortly after the release of PENSACOLA, Ribbon Skirt recorded a live session at the iconic Seattle radio station KEXP which should make its way online eventually.
This is all helpful in framing the release on PENSACOLA as an EP that keeps up the momentum left behind by Bite Down. As a sort of epilogue to the debut album, the EP leans into the sonic intensity featured in their debut — perhaps even intensified given the rush of energy built upon their first release. It is nonetheless an EP that maintains its consistency with the critically acclaimed album, acting as a closing extension of it and as an offering to those who were left wanting more (and trust me, there were many such people including myself).
With a runtime of approximately 13 minutes, it is a fairly accessible entry point into Ribbon Skirt’s music — in which case, turning back to the debut album will pay off all the more. PENSACOLA features four new tracks by Ribbon Skirt, some of which have made their way to live performances. At least as far as I can discern, I’ve listened to “LUCKY8” and “COMMA,” live during their performances at Sled Island in Calgary and The Buckingham in Edmonton. Across the board, the poetic lyricism mixed with Buswa’s vocal delivery cut through the blur of noise and melody to stage scenes of religious and spiritual ambiguity, precarious survival, and intergenerational resonances that live up to their description of the EP as a piece “shaped by memory and motion.”
The album kicks off with the heavy and slow groove of “LUCKY8,” where Buswa’s distorted vocals blend into the thick of the instrumental mix without losing the voice at the centre — this is certainly enhanced by the backing vocals that go between cleaner more spacey mixes that subtle shift into the distortion. Between the sway of Buswa’s vocals and the dense guitar composition by Riley, the album gets at the heart of the sonic palette that made their debut into an instant classic. One of the notable cuts in Bite Down is “41” which featured the use of autotune and harmonic vocal transformations that now find their way into “COMMA,” through a track that is spacey and reflective, allowing it to have this grandiose stadium concert vastness through the uses of reverb and delay which allowing the vocals to lead the way through the track. This marks the difference between “41” and “COMMA,” as the former blends the vocals into a heavier instrumental and the latter gets to be forward with these vocals that give a hyperpop edge to Ribbon Skirt’s sound. Even as the track gets louder, “COMMA” retains this vocal forwardness far into the track only to take it down a notch for the very last lines of the track, which is done effectively to give a sense of movement and looking back at the song as its own memory.
“BRAIDS” hits us with a serious and darkened sound between lush layered electric and acoustic guitars with a stretched vocal performances, all of which is decorated by shimmering bells and tambourines at the extreme pans of the mix that go between freely flowing through the track to enhancing the groove of a beat. Lastly, the album concludes with the title track which was also featured as a music video for the release. In many ways, this track makes apparent its personal nature sipping in the ambiguity of formative experiences framed by the pulls of traditional medicines and the institutional force of Christianity under colonialism. All of this gets bound together by the catchy hook in the chorus that makes this song stick in my mind. The track brings forth this appetite for self-destruction or some kind of edge in reaching at the extremity of the best feelings distorted by these personal ambiguities.
This is an album for those who are fans of musicians like Zoon and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, appealing to people who have an affinity for the layered and textured soundscapes found in shoegaze as well as Indigenizing transformations of the genre. Ribbon Skirt continues to be a stunning act of musical artistry and lyrical prowess that has picked up on the following behind their debut release and leaned on it to enhance it. You can tell that PENSACOLA turns up the notch on what made Bite Down one of the highlights of 2025, whether it is in the textured noise, the vocal dynamism, or the melodic composition. This only makes me all the more excited to see what Ribbon Skirt has coming up next for them.
