Rec Centre - Squash
Self-Released
Released on October 7th, 2025
If you keep up with music in Canada, specifically music media, you might have stumbled across Alex Hudson, who is the lovely editor-in-chief of Exclaim! Accordingly, Alex is an active part of music conversations across the country as a fellow Polaris Music Award juror. However, what many don’t realize is that he has been actively making music under the name Rec Centre for over a decade and half!
In fact, I didn’t know this until recently. I became aware of Rec Centre as I was having a conversation with Jeff Cancade (aka. Devours) for a “top secret” project for Cups N Cakes Network, which led to Jeff making a note that Alex makes music. So part of the deal here was that I would be listening to Alex’s music to become acquainted with his work, and I was quick to learn that Rec Centre had an album on the way.
From the beginning of the project, Rec Centre started out as a project that basked in playful experimentation and learning around producing music at a time where Hudson was living with his long-time collaborator Jay Arner (Energy Slime) who is an absolute sorcerer of sound production, mixing, and mastering. At the time, Hudson had access to Arner’s equipment and she graciously offered these devices to be used and her knowledge to be shared, which became a launching point for Rec Centre as a project with the first EP. Even when Hudson moved away to Toronto and secured his own gear, his creative relationship with Arner continued as she offered a wide array of encouragement and hands-on support in recording, producing, and mixing. Hudson highly regards Arner’s contributions to his work and sees her as emboldening the output of the project.
If you take a look through Rec Centre’s catalogue, you will find plenty of growth and development in the project from the early bedroom recordings in Long Weekend! (2010) and Times a Billion (2013) to this latest album: Squash. As an album and in spite of its naming after the sport (not the vegetable!), Squash germinated out vulnerable reflections that came at time where Hudson experienced the death of someone who had been close to him. This kicked off the personal working-through the confusion and disorientation such an event brings about. Over time, the tone of the record shifted over to a celebration of life and all its delicate minutiae by embracing the most mundane of activities and experiences. Squash was recorded in Hudson’s basement in Toronto. At the heart of the process lies this DIY spirit found in the single microphone overdubbings, the used guitar Hudson got from Adrian Teacher of Apollo Ghosts, and in the musical arrangements that resonate throughout his home. In Squash, Arner contributed synths, live drums and 12-string acoustic guitars into the tracks and Edmonton’s Nik Kozub was the mastering engineer.
Kicking off with the single “Polly and Andy,” you get a sense of what makes Rec Centre stand out: lush effected guitars with the twang of reverb and chorus along the steady bass synth and drums, all of this giving way to Hudson’s gentle vocals. Immediately, one can see the effectiveness of Hudson’s collaborative relationship with Arner, as Arner has contributed an atmospheric dimension to these tracks from the twinkling 12-string guitar at the end of the song to the steady indie bass synth and the crispness of the drums throughout the track. This becomes a consistent feature throughout the record as this track is followed by “Reclaimed by Nature,” “Tiger,” and “The Galileo." In “The Galileo,” there is a fun hard stereo panning done between the stripped down instrumental and the vocals which seldom come into a full stereo spread through beautiful synth based transitions (shout out to the Devours mention, by the way). “Tiger” is a particular stand out track for me with its energy slowly building throughout a steady beat with occasional accents and instrumental elements introduced. Eventually the track strips down to a synth pad and Hudson’s vocals, only to kick the full instrumental back up where it gets progressively louder with crisp distortion while also stripping down mixing again to really show off the interaction of all these instrumental elements.
Another stand out track is “Gravity Upside Down” which starts out with a relatively clean instrumental track with the occasional modulated guitar and shakers. But what makes this track unique is how it switches at the halfway point into a more synthy and elaborate sound, where the wetness of reverb, delay, chorus along with stretched out releases and tremolos on the synths create this enveloping sound. This is followed by the single “Undying” which does a similar switch sound around a third of the way. There is an element of these tracks that reminds me of sound pallets found in The Beatles, specifically in “Sun King” from Abbey Road. Then there is the synth heaviness from tracks like “Sadie,” “Trillions of Trilliums,” and the titular “Squash” which really offer a diverse sound to what has mostly been driven by guitar, drum, and bass grooves throughout the album. Specifically, “Trillions of Trilliums” has some incredibly dynamic synths and vocal production that really keep the longest track of the album straight up fascinating — we are talking about 8 minutes here, this is a feat for an otherwise indie rock album. The production and mixing in this track makes it probably my favorite song in the album, it starts fairly straightforward and then plunges into a sonic ambition that pays off every step of the way.
Overall, in many ways, Squash takes everything that Rec Centre had built up to in Maxed Out (2023) and takes it to the next level with its gentle thematic focus and its creative ways of playing on this long term creative collaboration with Jay Arner. Honestly, this album can appeal to a wide audience from indie rock darlings who want gentle rock music all the way over to engineering music heads who will find lots to dig into throughout some of the more ambitious cuts of the album. Hudson’s vocal performance evokes to me the gentleness found in twinkle daddy midwest emo like Quarterbacks or the softer takes from Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely State) combined with the midwestern indie instrumental approach from music coming out of Athens, Georgia in the 2000s by acts like Nana Grizol and Of Montreal.
I also want to encourage people to take a look and consider buying Squash as the proceeds from this record will go to cover the costs of Jay Arner’s medical transition. But if you want to donate to her directly, you can follow the fundraiser led by Jay’s wife and Energy Slime band member Jessica Delisle here:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-jay-arner-cover-transition-costs
