“I felt like I was the only person who could do what I was doing at the time,” he remembers. “I think it was ahead of the time – making music on your computer. No one was really doing that back then – rapping over electronic beats. Now, it’s less novel, but I love having this record as this time capsule of, ‘This is what it was like when I put out my first album.’”
After the high of releasing such a successful debut, there were also lows – quieter times in which Pemberton didn’t know if he’d make music again. But those lulls never lasted. His career reached a major milestone in 2021 when his record Parallel World won the $50,000 Polaris Prize, an award based solely on artistic merit. In short succession he also released a memoir, Bedroom Rapper, got married and had a kid. (The coming year looks to replicate that output with a book, Ways of Listening, and new album, Forager, on the horizon.)
“Writing Bedroom Rapper was very cathartic,” he says. “It was really a major demarcation point in my life. At the same time I was making Parallel World. I think going back and looking at my process for Breaking Kayfabe informed the making of Parallel World. It felt like a similar circumstance because when I made Breaking Kayfabe, I was living at my mom’s house. I was in the attic just teaching myself how to make beats and it was purely creative with no distractions. It was the same situation in the pandemic. I just totally had the mental real estate to be creative.”
The upcoming hometown show, meanwhile, might seem like it comes at an odd time – the lost week between Christmas and New Year – but it’s actually in keeping with Edmonton tradition.
“I remember, back in the day, it was always so exciting around Christmas because everybody would come back to town,” Pemberton says. “There was always a fun show around that time.”
This year that show is his. And though the crowd might be a little older, the beer might not be in 7 oz. glasses and pizza might not be by-the-slice, those tracks hold up as if it was yesterday.
Cadence Weapon performs at The Starlite Room on Dec. 27, 2025.