There’s an apocryphal suicide note from the 1700s. The author, whoever they were, wrote that they couldn’t face another day of buttoning and unbuttoning. Hockitay doesn’t remember exactly where he came across it, but it lodged somewhere and didn’t leave. “It really stuck with me,” he says. “The rest of the song came from there.”
That song is buttons, the new single from the Guatemalan-born, Montreal-based artist born to an environment where making things was simply what people did. “Growing up around visual art and film definitely shaped my taste, but I think the biggest impact was just seeing people treat creativity as part of everyday life,” he says. “Seeing people work consistently on something they cared about made art feel like a natural way of living. That gave me permission to fill my own free time with creative stuff, which eventually led me to music. That’s a privilege I don’t take lightly.”
That groundedness shows up in how he works. When he talks about the push and pull of making a track, it sounds less like a philosophical exercise and more like a practical problem he actually enjoys solving. “Most demos skew to one end of the spectrum,” he explains. “Sometimes they’re too indulgent in texture or production, and sometimes they feel too straightforward or traditional. The fun part is pulling these ideas towards whatever they’re lacking, whether that be aesthetics or substance. That’s usually where the balance starts to take shape, and where the song benefits most from the tension between different instincts in the room. A lot of demos don’t make it past that point, but it’s a helpful filter for figuring out which ideas are just cool and which ones are actually strong.”
His time studying Recording Arts at Concordia gave him a framework to work within and against. “The biggest concrete result was just ear training. It helped me mix my music more confidently,” he says. “Beyond that, learning about the science of sound, recording and mixing techniques, modular synthesis, and the history of musique concrète shaped the way I approach production pretty deeply. It gave me the vocabulary and perspective to find the sounds I’m looking for.”
buttons carries a weight that goes beyond its origin story. The line “The task of living is all consuming, don’t you find that I’ve consumed enough” is as direct as anything he’s written, and he doesn’t soften what it means. “All three, really,” he says, when asked whether burnout, technology, or something more internal drove it. “It’s the most direct way I could think of saying that suffering is an unavoidable part of life, which makes the unnecessary pain caused by greed, ego, and the systems built around them even more infuriating.” The song ties into a larger current running through the project. “The beauty of life is lost on those in power,” he says plainly.
The video, directed by Buvard and David S. Blouin, was shot on a full-spectrum modified camera capable of capturing ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light at the same time. The result is imagery that feels like it exists in a frequency slightly outside the normal visible world. But the process that got them there was less controlled than the finished product suggests. “Buvard had wanted to shoot something in infrared with a full-spectrum camera long before we started talking about a video for buttons,” Hockitay says. “It ended up being the perfect medium for the song, because we wanted to emphasize the fear and underlying threat that drive it. The limitations of shooting that way forced us to rethink the story constantly, and that ended up pushing the video into a much more unsettling and surreal place.”
When he talks about who he’s making music for, or more precisely, what state he imagines them in, the picture is specific. “I think being on a bus, in the metro, or in a car can bring out the introspective state I both make music from and enjoy listening in,” he says. “Some of my favourite memories with music are on the way home after a long day. You’re sort of forced to sit there and let whatever you’re listening to score what you’re seeing, whether that’s the view through the window or the crowd around you.” It’s a small but telling detail about where his instincts come from.
The names that tend to come up around his music, James Blake, Sampha, King Krule, Bon Iver, are ones he acknowledges with some precision. “Definitely that balance between organic and synthetic elements,” he says. “I think those artists inspired my collage-like approach to music over the years. Where I’ve pushed away is in the writing itself, as this project is a bit more direct in tone.”
buttons follows over/over, his debut single, which drew placements on Stereogum and The Line of Best Fit and landed on eleven Spotify editorial playlists, including New Music Friday and RADAR Canada. That kind of early traction can shift how an artist thinks about what they’re doing, or it can’t. For Hockitay, it hasn’t. “Getting that type of exposure is validating, but it’s completely separate from the music itself, in my mind.”
The EP is out now, and it sounds like a deliberate step outward. “This EP takes some of the interior themes of my past work and pushes them outward,” he says. “It feels less self-contained and more engaged with the world around me.” Given where buttons lands, it’s a strong place to start.
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