The cassette goes on sale at the Art Gallery of Ontario today, which is a strange way to release a record in 2026, and entirely the point.
Melissa Auf der Maur has released BASS WOMB ROOM: My ’90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings, fifteen tracks she wrote and recorded alone on a four-track tape machine in her apartment during the 1990s, alongside experimental recordings made on tour. It is her first new music in fifteen years, following 2010’s Out of Our Minds. The AGO cassette lands today, September 2. Wider release follows on September 4.
The record exists because of an exhibition. Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs also opens at the AGO today, drawing on the photographs she took from inside the touring life rather than from the pit. An accompanying installation, also called Bass Womb Room, is built around a mirrored pyramid with video set to her music.
Auf der Maur grew up here in Montreal, started out playing bass in Tinker in the early nineties, and was pulled into Hole in 1994 after Kristen Pfaff’s death. She spent five years in that band, then joined the Smashing Pumpkins for the Machina tour in 2000. The four-track demos on this record predate most of that, or run underneath it: the songs she was writing for herself while playing someone else’s.
She has not heard the version of her own past that most people have. These recordings sat unreleased for three decades, and the decision to put them out as archive rather than as a comeback album is a distinction worth noting. There is no new studio material here. What there is instead is a document, released in a format that matches the way it was made.
Auf der Maur has spent the last decade running Basilica Hudson, the arts space she co-founded in New York State, which is where the photographs and the tapes were sitting.
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