If you want to revel in some Edmonton-centric millennial nostalgia, revisit Cadence Weapon’s “Oliver Square.” The track, from his first solo album, released in 2005, is like a city yearbook. From drunken slices at Funky Pickle to pitchers at The Strat to the name of the song itself, the song is an archive of a city now changed. Rollie Pemberton, the award-winning rapper and writer who performs as Cadence Weapon, describes it as a “map to nowhere.”
Only, that’s not exactly true. Those shuttered, renamed, revamped locations make up a map of memories – his and ours – that have just turned 20 years old. Pemberton is marking the anniversary of the entire album, Breaking Kayfabe, with a small tour that concludes in Edmonton at the Starlight Room on Dec. 27.
“It’s like it’s a newspaper of the time that it came out in,” Pemberton says of the album. “I’m really proud that I spoke to the moment that I was in. I didn’t try to do something that was just trendy. How specific it was to where I was living ended up being the greatest strength.”
Pemberton – who grew up in Edmonton but now calls Toronto home – was something of a wunderkind when his debut album came out in November 2005. The record was quickly nominated for a Polaris Prize, added to heavy rotation on CBC Radio 3 and landed him on the cover of Exclaim magazine.
“I had so much success initially that I thought it was just normal,” he laughs. “I realize now that it was a pretty remarkable situation, especially coming from Edmonton. I knew about the local rap scene here, but it wasn’t something that anybody else knew about anywhere in the world. People were not aware of what was going on in Edmonton.”
The record broke ground not only because of its hyperspecific references to place – something Canadian artists in all genres historically shied away from in hopes of appealing to wider (i.e. U.S.) audiences – but Pemberton also melded rap and electronic music in a new and appealing way.
“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.
