Throughout her life, Toronto-based Dinah Thorpe has been the singing jock–a polymath possessing two talents that others sought to set at odds. A gentle giant and keen basketball player, Dinah was kicked out of her school’s choir when she was young, told by her teachers that she wasn’t able to occupy both spaces. It’s only now–deep into her career as a musician–that Dinah realized just how wrong they were.

Dinah’s musical universe is home to both the emotional and the physical. “I put sad words inside of bangers,” she says, her smoky alto the essence of the visceral and melodic. With it, she weaves together politics, interpersonal relationships, and the natural world into music that itches and pulsates.

Critics have described Dinah, who previously performed as ‘Dinah Thorpe,’ as “a composer of infinite cleverness,” while comparing her to the likes of Portishead, Laurie Anderson, and David Bowie. She has shared stages with Jeremy Dutcher, The Cliks, Sondre Lerche, Eternia, and Buck 65. In Toronto, she is a dedicated activist, an all-seasons cyclist, and a pick-up basketball player who’s happiest when the game is fast and the score is tied.

Now, with the release of her sixth album, Dinah!, more than ever before she is bringing together the two worlds that her teachers tried to split apart. Written and recorded during the pandemic, the 17 songs on Dinah! are short and intense: taut with tender tension, pain and restraint, the sound of a jock trying to stifle her tears midway through a game.

The album’s musical palette was largely inspired by Dinah’s recent purchase of a sequencer and a bass ukulele, two instruments that vibrate the body with their low frequencies. With them, Dinah creates a dynamic frisson, inventing a sound that’s as accessible as it is unusually affecting, as moving for the body as it is the mind. She was also inspired by musicians like clipping. and Björk, who incorporate glitch into their sound, as well as ‘90s techno she’d sweat to before a basketball game. There’s a sense of propulsion that stops and starts throughout the album, with Dinah relying on her own sense of timing before her voice is offered up to a driving beat.

During the pandemic–when this album was written and recorded–Dinah’s relationship with her voice changed, and became even more embodied. Without a live setting to perform in, Dinah’s voice became less a conduit for connecting with other human beings and more one for tapping into herself, as well as something more mystical. “I realized how important it was for me to keep singing in the pandemic, even though I wasn't singing in front of anyone,” she recalls, almost on the brink of tears. Her voice was also affected by her immersion in yoga during the pandemic, an activity that caused her to focus on breath, and to strengthen the length of each exhalation. You can hear this across Dinah!, the expression of physicality and emotion through the control of sound and breath.

The musician’s best work to date, Dinah! is both a document of pandemic-based life and a beautiful experiment in turning sound and raw feeling into something tactile. It’s sound you can touch, and sound that touches you in return.

- Emma Madden