“Don’t worry, I’m in therapy.” It’s the kind of line that makes you laugh before you fully register what came before it. MINOE is talking about her new single “Loophole,” a song about dissociation, abuse, and mentally checking out when someone is hurting you. It sounds like a floor-filler.
“Loophole explores the feeling of mentally stepping outside yourself when someone is yelling at you, using restraint and distance as a way to survive,” she explains. “I touch on how I really loved this person and I did everything to protect their abuse, hide it away, I let in their negative words and believed them — until I found the loophole: I’m literally just not going to let anything in. Lalalala can’t hear you! It’s almost a cheeky response to very serious abuse but hey, don’t worry, I’m in therapy.”
Making people move to something this heavy is a choice, but MINOE doesn’t really frame it that way. For her, the humour and the heartbreak just coexist naturally. “I think there’s a humour in it, and I love comedy, it’s always been a part of who I am. I love a good coping mechanism, and I don’t really like to sit in my feelings for very long personally, so maybe the dance element of it is providing a solution at the same time we’re addressing the problem. But it’s not intentional. It just feels natural for me.”
She’s been finding ways to process things through music since she was seven years old, writing songs in a home where there wasn’t much money and even less space to be heard. “Songwriting gave me a creative outlet that I didn’t need any materials for, and because we didn’t have much money growing up that was really important. I was really shy and introverted as a kid, I had a lot to say but nobody to talk to about it, and (very luckily) musical genetics, so it was such an important tool for processing, really the only tool I had.”
I first caught MINOE live when she opened for Tom Grennan back in 2022. Where songwriting once functioned as a private diary, it now operates as something closer to a shared language. “Now that I’m an adult it’s become more of a language than a diary. I love working with other people and helping other artists understand their own feelings through this skill that I’ve cultivated for so long. It has become more about connection for me than something to do alone, but I’ll always write alone in my room sometimes.”
The traumas explored on “Loophole” are ones she’s been circling for years, waiting for enough distance to finally address them directly. “The traumas I reference on this track are things I’ve wanted to write about for a long time but never had the courage to. I finally feel enough distance from the situation to speak about it openly, which is scary but also freeing. I hope it reaches young people who might really need a song like this. That’s more important to me than privacy.”
After being ousted as a teenager in Nova Scotia, she moved to Montreal at eighteen to start over, enrolling in a fine arts program and giving herself room to simply breathe. “The move was so important. I was only eighteen when I moved and I was going to university for fine arts, I wasn’t thinking about music for a little while because I just let myself breathe. I was happy crying all the time because I had a place I could call home. The music focus came back after my nervous system calmed down, and then it was just fun and exciting to work with so many talented people in the city. It’s home.”
Montreal has shaped her in ways that are hard to untangle from everything else, though she’s candid about where she fits, or doesn’t, in its music landscape. “I love Montreal, my whole adult life has been here so I definitely feel like the music has those roots, but there isn’t a huge queer pop music scene here so I’m not sure if it ‘fits in.’ I’m excited to be part of a new generation of Montreal music.” Her upcoming project attempts to honour both places, blending her current sound with a Nova Scotian past she’s come to appreciate from a distance. “I’m so proud to be Nova Scotian, I’m in love with Montreal, and I’m excited to blend those vibes together.”
The community she’s built around her music reflects those same values. Bleeding Hearts Disco was described from the outset as uniting “the pop girls, gays and theys,” and the response confirmed she’d found her people. “Building that community starts with the music. As a queer person I can feel when something is made for our community, or when it speaks to us; it can feel friendly, sexy, fierce. It addresses topics head on that mainstream pop might shy away from. My references are all queer culture, my friends are all queer, so really when I say that I mean I’m making music for me and my friends and inviting others to join our party. I know when it’s working when my friends like what I’m doing, but also when I get these really heartfelt, funny, talented queer people in my comments online. That’s the best.”
Since Bleeding Hearts Disco, MINOE has released three standalone singles: “Jealous,” which debuted at Osheaga, the collaborative “Lollipop” with Slater Manzo, and “Liquorlips” with fellow Canadian artist Renon, the latter now approaching a million streams of its own. The collaborations have stayed intentionally light in emotional weight, kept in what she calls “a fantasy land,” which she sees as the most natural way to open the creative process to others without giving too much away. “Both of those songs are pretty lighthearted, fun, sexy; they don’t dive into anything too personal and remain kind of in a fantasy land, which I think is a good way to collab with others. I think keeping it fantastical helps put both people on a level playing field.”
The Osheaga debut with “Jealous” came with its own hard-won lesson, not about the performance itself, but about what surrounded it. “I did learn something from that but it may not be what you’d expect. I changed my release strategy after that show because I was so busy preparing for it and feeling big emotions that I had a hard time promoting the track before and after the gig. It was amazing to preview it there and the crowd was awesome, but I think now it’s better to separate releases from big career moments like that so I can give them all my attention.”
Last year’s “Teenage Disillusionment” signalled something new was coming, drawing on earlier influences including Clams Casino, Imogen Heap, and Lykke Li. “Teenage Disillusionment is a taste of my influences as a little girl, and they’re all coming back on my project. In this scenario, I leaned on artists I grew up on while writing songs about my life in that time period. I’m never loyal to a genre so I can best communicate the story and the emotion I’m feeling, and I know that’s not the most brand-savvy thing to do, but that’s what feels right to me.”
“Loophole” continues that thread, but MINOE sees it less as a sequel and more as a true beginning, the actual starting point for the story she’s been working toward. “This chapter is really chapter one. I’m doing a Star Wars thing where Bleeding Hearts Disco was more representative of me now, as an adult, while my upcoming work will tell the story of where I come from. I want to purge my childhood so I can root the rest of my work in the fundamental truth of my experience. I want to invite people in.”
And the legacy she’s after? She already knows. “I think it’s very on brand for me, something that makes you wanna dance with super depressing lyrics. If that’s my legacy, I’ll die happy.”
Photo credit: Eleala (@ele4la)
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