“Can anyone tell me who I’m supposed to be?”

Not going to lie the title of this track is giving me really hard flashbacks, but luckily this track is a lot more upbeat and fun than the actual election night. My tears still haven’t dried.

So, moving on (or trying to) we’ve got this super danceable psych-rock single “Election Season” from Toronto’s Mute Choir.

Their music, above all else, is about Freedom, and to understand Freedom one must experience the opposite. The band’s debut album Behind the Bars exemplifies the clash between those two forces through a distinctive blend of untamed rock and introspective balladry with an eye on the ever-elusive goal of making dance music with a message. 

That message is largely how the frontman Sam Arion reached this place. Born in Iran and raised in both the overcrowded suburbs and isolated rural areas of Toronto, their debut album encompasses Arion’s evolution as a songwriter since then, discarding traditional pop and rock lyrics for deeper concepts of self-discovery.

“Election Season is a song that came as a sort of emotional response to a time in my life where I had a lot of different voices around me telling me the versions of myself that I should be, and that really messed with my head for a while. It left me in a place in my music and in my life where I felt very indecisive, like I didn’t have an objective view of who I was or what I wanted.”

The beauty in this whole self-discovery process // making music is that this track ended up being one of his favorites on the record, and after he wrote it he came back and was all like, “I know exactly what I want to do now.”

Listen to “Election Season” below.