Awake & Dreaming: Inevitable
Awake & Dreaming’s Inevitable: Beautifully Lost in the Machine
by Jack Rush Photo credit: Sacha Kristoff
There is something unsettling about listening to Inevitable, the debut album from Waterloo, Ontario’s Awake & Dreaming. Not because the record is relentlessly dark—it isn’t—but because it understands something increasingly difficult to ignore: we are living in a world that has become exceptionally good at keeping us distracted from ourselves.
Across ten tracks and nearly 49 minutes, Inevitable explores what it means to remain human while technology, dopamine, anxiety, grief and endless digital noise compete for our attention. It is an ambitious subject for a debut, but Awake & Dreaming avoid turning the album into a lecture. Instead, they build the argument into the music itself.
The result is a record of contrasts: intimate piano passages surrounded by walls of distortion, electronic textures rubbing against organic instrumentation, moments of isolation expanding into widescreen catharsis. There is darkness here, but also genuine wonder.
And that duality is central to the band's identity.
Frontwoman Sasha Kristoff lives with Type 2 Narcolepsy, meaning that being simultaneously awake and dreaming is part of her everyday reality. Awake & Dreaming have taken that contradiction and made it the organizing principle of their music. The songs repeatedly inhabit opposing states—connected yet isolated, hopeful yet frightened, in love yet grieving—and refuse to resolve the tension too easily.
That makes Inevitable feel less like a collection of songs than a sustained conversation with itself.
The album's technological anxiety arrives early. “Rewire,” one of the record's two lead singles, turns the dopamine economy of modern life into an almost hypnotic mantra: “Inspire me. Desire me. Admire me. Rewire me.” The repetition initially feels seductive before becoming suffocating. Eventually the mantra collapses into the admission, “I’m bored.” By the time the bridge reaches for “Rewire me so I can feel again,” the song has revealed that its real subject isn't technology at all. It's disconnection.
“Underwater,” the other lead single, takes a more internal route. It feels like a conversation conducted at 2 a.m., when there is nobody left to impress and the mind finally catches up with itself. The song's central image—letting something go before it swallows you whole—becomes increasingly physical as the arrangement rises around the vocal. There is no conventional explosive payoff. Instead, the song seems to sink deeper into itself, until the words eventually disappear beneath the water.
That refusal to follow obvious rock conventions is one of Inevitable's strengths.
Awake & Dreaming clearly understand the language of alternative rock, but they aren't particularly interested in simply reproducing it. There are echoes of Radiohead's technological unease, Muse's scale and theatricality, and the atmospheric vulnerability associated with artists such as AURORA and Lola Young. Yet the band's strongest moments come when those influences become ingredients rather than destinations.
The production helps enormously. The album was produced by the band itself, then mixed by nine-time Juno Award winner Jay Dufour and mastered by João Carvalho, whose credits include Rush, The Tragically Hip and Alexisonfire. The finished record has enough sonic weight to reward a loud listen, but its quieter passages are equally important. Piano, synths and electronic atmospheres are allowed to breathe before guitars and drums suddenly make the room feel much larger.
That dynamic is essential to the album's emotional architecture.
Inevitable isn't simply asking whether technology is good or bad. Its questions are considerably more uncomfortable. What happens when convenience becomes dependency? When stimulation replaces curiosity? When the feed never ends and the answers arrive before we've had time to formulate the questions?
And perhaps most importantly: what happens to us when the noise never stops?
The album doesn't pretend to have the answer.
Instead, it ends by allowing a little light into the picture. After all the anxiety, dopamine loops, grief, parental fears and existential questioning, there remains the possibility that being human might still mean something precisely because we are capable of questioning where we're headed.
That's what makes the title Inevitable particularly effective. The future is coming whether we're prepared for it or not. Technology will continue to change us. The question isn't whether we can stop that process. The question is what we choose to preserve along the way.
For a debut album, Inevitable is remarkably assured. It is big without being bombastic, intimate without becoming confessional for its own sake, and thoughtful without sacrificing the visceral pleasures of alternative rock.
Most importantly, it sounds like a band wrestling with something real.
In a culture increasingly designed to keep us scrolling, Awake & Dreaming have made a record that asks us to stop and listen.
And that may be the most human thing they could have done.
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