The latest body of work from award-winning Inuk singer/songwriter Beatrice Deer, Inuit Legend is a portal to a wildly enchanted world largely unknown to those outside its borders. In assembling the album’s spellbinding suite of songs, the Montreal-based artist reimagined a number of fables and real-life tales passed down from her ancestors, interpreting each phantasmic piece of folklore through a decidedly modern lens. With its deliberate focus on stories of feminine power, the LP makes for a thrilling document of transformation and survival—a narrative closely aligned with her own journey in struggling against the extraordinary hardship endemic to her homeland of Nunavik (a historically disenfranchised region deep in the Canadian Arctic). When met with Deer’s raw yet extravagant take on indie-rock, Inuit Legend brings a bold new vitality to its age-old stories, ultimately transmitting their transcendent wisdom to an audience that spans beyond boundaries of any kind.

The eighth studio LP from Deer (whose acclaimed catalog includes 2018’s Canadian Folk Music Award-winning My All To You), Inuit Legend finds her joining forces with her longtime bandmates Mark “Bucky” Wheaton (a drummer known for his work with Land of Talk) and Christopher
McCarron (also a guitarist for beloved indie band Stars), summoning a sublimely mercurial sound centered on her shapeshifting vocal work. In a potent introduction to the album’s prismatic beauty, its lead single “Arranged” arrives as a luminous duet with fellow Inuk singer/songwriter Johnny “Yaa” Saunders, who accompanies Deer in a soaring meditation on the phenomenon of arranged marriages (a practice upheld by the Inuit through the 1960s). “That song came from listening to many elders talk about their own experience with arranged marriage—my auntie, for example, didn’t want to marry her husband and refused to even speak to him at first, but over time she fell so in love with him,” Deer explains. “Nowadays people can live alone forever, but our ancestors had nothing but each other and needed to stay together just to survive.”

In its frenetic collision of dream-pop, indie-folk, and gloriously cathartic alt-rock, Inuit Legend embodies a sonic grandeur that fully matches the majesty of its storytelling—a dynamic gorgeously displayed on songs like “Caterpillar” (a moody but exhilarating track that revisits the tragically twisted tale of an infertile woman who adopts a caterpillar as her baby) and “Aukkauti” (a near-operatic, shoegaze-leaning stunner inspired by a true account of a family’s gruesome murder after anill-fated hunting expedition). On “Falcon and the Woman,” Deer mines her vast imagination and dreams up a defiant anthem touched with a tender ferocity. “I had a vague memory of a story about an evil falcon kidnapping a woman but couldn’t find it anywhere, so I turned it into my own story of surviving domestic violence,” she notes. And on “The Fog,” Inuit Legend takes on a euphoric intensity, bringing lustrous guitar riffs and brightly stomping rhythms to one of the album’s most fantastically strange myths. “It’s about a hunter who’s out on the tundra and gets captured by a giant, but ends up killing the giant with an axe,” says Deer. “As he’s running away, the giant’s wife chases after him and the hunter splits the ground with the axe, then challenges her to drink all the
water in the river that’s formed between them. The giant’s wife drinks up the water until finally she explodes, and the mist that’s left behind is what we now know as fog.” 

With its lyrics mainly delivered in her native language of Inuktitut (with occasional flashes of English and French), Inuit Legend often weaves Deer’s hypnotic throat-singing into its lavish tapestry of sound. Half-Inuk and half-Mohawk, Deer grew up in the tiny village of Quaqtaq, married young, and started out in music by collaborating with her former husband. “For a long time my whole musical identity was tied to him, and I didn’t consider myself a musician or think I was capable of making music by myself,” she reveals. After moving to Montreal at age 23 and eventually striking out on her own, Deer took up guitar and soon cultivated the daringly original style she refers to as “Inuindie,” swiftly earning praise from major outlets like NPR (who remarked that “her voice is slinky and raw, colored by whichever language makes sense for the story...Deer has crafted a yearning sound undoubtedly and uniquely her own”). Along with releasing a series of critically lauded albums (and scoring a No. 1 hit with her 2021 single “UQAUTINNGA”), she’s now brought her singular musicality to such illustrious endeavors as composing the score for Angakusajaujuq: The Shaman’s Apprentice (a 2021 animated short film shortlisted for an Oscar nomination). 

While Deer’s heritage has always deeply informed her musical output, Inuit Legend marks her most direct exploration of the generational trauma endured by the people of Nunavik—a region whose suicide rates rank among the highest in the world and whose fraught history includes devastating famine and the Sixties Scoop (a government-supported effort in which upwards of 20,000 Indigenous infants and children were forcibly removed from their homes and put up for adoption). To that end, the achingly delicate “Epidemic” emerged as Deer reflected on a mid-century measles outbreak that took the lives of her grandmother Eva, Eva’s three-month-old baby, and 10 other people in just three weeks due to a lack of access to medicine. “Because of systemic racism the educational system typically doesn’t acknowledge our history, so artists are the ones who need to shine a light on Inuit and Indigenous people,” says Deer. “It’s on us to start that dialogue, and to counteract all the stigma and negative stereotypes we’ve dealt with for so long.”

Despite the gravity of its origins, Inuit Legend radiates an unbridled energy that partly stems from the immense joy that Deer experienced in creating the album. “I wanted to make sure that I really honored these stories and my ancestors and their creativity, but I also had so much fun in that process,” she says. “We have such a rich history and a unique way of life—my mom grew up in an igloo, and how many people can say that? One of my hopes for the album is that people will hear these songs and want to learn more about the stories that inspired them. I want it to create a ripple effect, and help people to understand that my people have always been here.”