Greyhound

Closing in on five years on from its release, Katie Tupper's 2021 debut single "Live Inside" has lived up to its title. The breezy chorus melody — sung in her deliciously rich, smoked sandalwood alto — is exactly the kind you can find swimming up from somewhere deep within you at any given moment, understatedly marking the arrival of a modern R&B singer-songwriter capable of captivating audiences across Canada and beyond."Can I be honest?" Tupper asks at the top of "Disappear," the opening track of her long-waited debut album Greyhound — as though her music has ever been anything but. Starting a record with an unvarnished piano ballad is a bold choice, but Tupper is self-assured, with towering background vocals looming large as she admits, "The more you try to love me, the more I disappear."The Saskatoon-born artist at once conjures the sprawling skies she grew up beneath and the gritty streets of Toronto she now walks, laying out the complex emotional threads of the pressure to meet a partner's expectations that comes after the initial ecstasy of falling for them. In fact, "pressure" is a word that comes up often on Greyhound, something of a touchstone at the core of Tupper's emotional experience that ties in with the thematic arc of being both the titular racing dog and the unreachable decoy they're goaded to chase around the track.Beyond the distinctiveness of her voice, Tupper's lyricism is thoughtful and evocative, while her persona toes the line of intense vulnerability and elusive slipperiness; for as much as she exposes her relationship struggles and anxieties, she also staves them off by embracing playfulness.Where a buzzy contemporary like Olivia Dean leans into old-school soul sounds and wholesomeness, Tupper is more new-school, incorporating breakbeats on whirring centrepiece "Right Hand Man" and extraterrestrial synths on "Obviously Desperate," a standout among the tracks that weren't pre-release singles: "Everything's ironic, horrible and ugly / Now I think I'm gonna die, so / I go back home and / Touch myself," she sings, sandwiching syllables rushed to the end of the line and dramatically drawn-out intonations."I can't die alone if I've got multiple lovers," Tupper winks on closer "Cowboy Lullaby," going on to drawl over twangy strings and a womp-womp of pedal steel, "Sorry I'm not sexier / When I'm here crying," effortlessly infusing a kiss of classic country instrumentation to bookend the dust-cloud suspension of Bob Seger-referencing early track "Tennessee Heat." Fittingly, Greyhound came together as a slow burn: she composed and produced it alongside Felix Fox (BADBADNOTGOOD, Jonah Yano) and Justice Der (Rachel Bobbitt, Mah Moud), a process that took the trio about two years of on-and-off writing and recording amidst their busy schedules. The breathing room is something you can feel in the record's pacing, piano lines at varying tempos anchoring nearly every track like a heartbeat; the undercurrent of time being kept.Greyhound toys with time's passage in this way, like slow-motion playback of a dog's lean yet muscular haunches propel it around the final corner of the race — movement that, in reality, passes by in a rippling flash of a shiny, steel-coloured coat. Tupper is an artist with the kind of gravity to hold down a moment, and it feels like this one is hers for the taking.