There is a version of Toronto's music scene that gets written about constantly — the one with streaming numbers and industry co-signs and carefully managed rollouts. And then there is the one that actually sustains the city's creative life: the collectives, the labels running on belief, the artists who have been building something real for a decade without much of the recognition they deserve. Witch Prophet has lived in that second world for a long time. With Words Are Spells / Thoughts Are Magic, released March 18 on her own Heart Lake Records imprint, she has made the record that collapses the distance between those two worlds — not by chasing the first one, but by making the second one impossible to ignore.
Language as the Whole Point
The album's title is not a metaphor — it is a thesis. Witch Prophet, born Etmet Musa and also known as Ayo Leilani, has always treated language as something closer to technology than communication. Her vocals move between English, Tigrinya, and Amharic, not as a novelty but as a structural choice: the ancestral and the contemporary running in parallel, neither subordinate to the other. On Words Are Spells / Thoughts Are Magic, that approach reaches its most developed form. The record is structured as a dual-sided project — two distinct halves that function like a conversation between inherited knowledge and present-day intention. The production, handled by Witch Prophet and her collaborator and wife SUN SUN, is dense without being cluttered: jazz piano phrases that open onto trip-hop percussion, vocal loops that layer until they create a kind of harmonic weather.
This is music that asks something of the listener. Not patience exactly — the tracks are not long or difficult — but attention. You have to actually show up for it.
What the Polaris Nominations Were Always About
Witch Prophet received a Polaris Prize shortlist nod for DNA Activation in 2020 and a longlist placement for Gateway Experience in 2023. Both were deserved. But the Polaris ecosystem, for all its genuine commitment to adventurous Canadian music, has a tendency to recognize artists in the moment of their greatest legibility — when the music is doing something familiar enough to explain in a press release. Words Are Spells / Thoughts Are Magic is less legible than either of those records. It is harder to summarize. It is also better.
The breakthrough here is in how the album handles grief and ancestral resonance simultaneously — not as separate themes but as the same thing observed from different angles. Witch Prophet's Ethiopian/Eritrean lineage runs through the harmonic choices, the vocal textures, the rhythmic structures. But this is not roots music in any conventional sense. It is music that understands roots as something living and forward-moving, not preserved.
The Heart Lake Model
Heart Lake Records, the collective Witch Prophet co-founded (formerly 88 Days of Fortune), represents one of the most coherent artistic visions in Canadian independent music. The label has operated for years as proof that you can build a sustainable creative infrastructure without major industry support — that the work itself, sustained over time, becomes its own argument. Words Are Spells / Thoughts Are Magic is the fullest expression of that argument to date.
She has performed at SXSW, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Great Escape in the UK. She has shared stages with Sudan Archives, JPEGMAFIA, Tash Sultana. The resume is international and serious. What is remarkable is that none of it has flattened the music — she has not made concessions in the direction of reach. Words Are Spells / Thoughts Are Magic sounds like it was made by an artist who has decided, definitively, that the music itself is the whole project.
That is rarer than it should be, and it sounds exactly like what it is: a record made without apology, in the only language that matters.
