Tanya Tagaq - Saputjiji
Six Shooter
Released on March 6th, 2026
For over a decade and a half, Tanya Tagaq has built an extensive and varied music repertoire which has just welcomed its newest entry through the release of Saputjiji. Her award-winning work thrives by way of its explorations of throat singing, industrial music, classical sound composition, fuzzy punk rock grooves, and elaborate music production. These features of Tagaq’s work show as early her debut album Sinaa (2005), which emphatically places Tagaq’s acapella orchestration front and center. By the time that Auk/Blood (2007) released, Tagaq’s musical angle became quite extensive as more elements of instrumentation and plays on genre started taking place.
Saputjiji continues to show the wide-ranging musical and political affinities that defined Tanya Tagaq’s work over the last few decades. With percussion, synths and organ by producer and longtime drummer/collaborator Jean Martin, drum machine and synth by producer Sumach, Saputjiji also includes contributions from Jeffrey Zeigler (cello), Kevin Hearn (keys/synths), Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham (vocals), Patrick O’Reilly (electric guitar), Celina Kalluk (vocals) and Kevin Richardson (piano). All these collaborations come together into an intensive album designed to be a jugular cut at the powers that be in the network of military-industrial techno-capitalism. One could say that the composition of Saputjiji is tantamount to its name, which means designed protector.
The album plays on this strategic character with its first track, “Fuck War.” Frankly, a single that immediately hooked me into what this album’s sound built up to when I first heard it. With the rhythmic groove of the central drum, the warring sounds come together to state the titular lyrics as instrumental dissonance and intensive guttural throat singing build up the track’s energy. “Razorblades” takes this into a Nine Inch Nails / Trent Reznor inspired track driven by industrial basses and its mesmerising spoken word vocals, which creates an ambiance that is hypnotic as much as it is alarming with the cutting paned vocals. Lyrically, this track offers the most overt statement over the album’s driving themes contrasting the forced resilience of practicing suffering over and against the underlying vulnerability that has been compromised along the way. Similarly, tracks like “Ikualajut,” “Lichens,” and “Black Boot” take on a similar sound and approach while elaborating on these thematic concerns.
“Foxtrot” plays on the military vocabulary to deliver an industrial electro-punk drone. Although short in its run time, this song is fascinating from a production and sound mixing perspective as one can pick up in its open ended spaces and its most saturated points, particularly at points where the throat singing and melodic singing are layered over each other while having some active panning making the sonic space move quite dynamically. This type of energy is shifted over to the more melancholic melodies of “When They Call,” a track which is string-driven and a slow reprieve from the tense aggressiveness from the start of the album — something which sips back in as the song builds up energy down the line. This is followed by an equally meditative track in the haunting “Exit Wound.” The track leans into the influence of Radiohead’s In Rainbows through its steady rhythmic bass and instrumental design. Think tracks like “Videotape” or “Weird Fishes / Arpeggi,” and then you see how Tagaq makes this sound her own to directly plead Inuit youth to stay in light of Nunavut’s high suicide rate.
As the album goes on, we get a peak into some other angles for music composition that recur in Tagaq’s discography. For example, “Bohica” brings a cinematic trip-hop composition, where the spatial mixing of various instrumental and vocal elements work closely with the underlying strings and beat moving back and forward. “Expensive Plane Tickets” gives dissonant and disjointed sounds that roughly come together while eventually giving way to an intensive wall of noise. And then “Imiq” closes the album with a lush and beautiful composition, thriving in angelic vocal layers, light synthesizers, and emotive strings coming together to put all matters in the album to rest. “Imiq” in particular feels like a movie unto itself, with its sense of movement that waves in and out of sonic intensities.
Overall, Saputjiji continues to showcase the breadth and depth of what Tanya Tagaq can do with her music. The album embraces all variety of sounds, moods, tones, and demeanors as a way of orchestrating a critique of colonial capitalism and its imperial arm while also refusing to compromise the things worth protecting along the way — a reminder that to fight against such systematic issues is to fight for something. There is a kind of deflation of the military analogy parodized throughout the album, something which finds its way around through its most upfront spoken word moments or its most soft emotive turns. By the end of the album, the sound is altogether different — one may hope that we are too by the end of it.
