Tribal allegiance is a powerful impetus behind the construction of various cultural scenes.

Particularly within independent music communities, a sense of individual identity has historically been shaped as much by rejecting as embracing competing conventions. Dance music afficionados aren’t so much into guitar-driven rock and roll; rock and rollers snub hop-hop; rap kids don’t listen to punk, and so on. Or at least that’s how these communities were once constituted.

But nowadays on the island of Montreal, diverse scenes are less islands unto themselves and at least mutually aware if not entirely accepting of one another. This interpenetration arguably makes for more exciting, innovative, and genre-acrostic music in which unexpected influences overlap and bleed into each other.

This is the case for Karma Glider, the shoegaze-inspired, post-punk-tinged, pop-inflected project fronted by Fredericton-born and Montreal-based Susil Sharma. A Canadian of Nepalese descent transplanted from the East Coast and making a mutant form of Britpop in a French-speaking province is exemplary of Montreal’s multivalent cultural Venn diagram.

Karma Glider’s Mothland-released debut LP is the evocatively titled From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth. Sharma, 37, realized it together with producer and engineer Joseph Donovan, and Adiran Popovich of Tricky Woo fame, who now operate Mountain City, a studio located in N.D.G.

“I’ve been recording with them for years,” Sharma says. “They really feel like partners in crafting sound. At one point I went a little Kevin Shields studio madness energy, getting obsessed. I took all the guitar tracks down and redid some stuff. I favour recording a little more and increasingly I’m trying to savour the writing process.”

The LP skilfully traverses the landscape of Sharma’s most potent influences. “I love My Bloody Valentine,” Sharma tells me. “I’m really into Spiritualized and Jesus and Mary Chain. Primal Scream. Being 15 years old in 2003, The Strokes are woven into my musical genetics. The Velvet Underground, The Stooges, Patti Smith — a lot of that New York proto-punk scene is really important to me.”

Sharma relocated to Montreal two decades ago, “for school, on paper,” he explains, and quickly fell into a musical life.

“I went to McGill for one semester,” Sharma says, “but I dropped out right away and joined a band. It just felt like something else was happening. I was working at American Apparel at the time. Vice was the preeminent media. It felt like Montreal was the place to be for a young person trying to make art.”

From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth reflects on that era with a sentimental but not saccharine nostalgic sensibility. Its songs are concise studies featuring melodic riffs and hooks that gesture both back in time and forward at once and set Karma Glider apart from explicitly retromaniacal fare.

“I’ve got two older sisters,” says Sharma. “They’re six and 12 years older and they were showing me a lot of punk music. Grunge. They were around for Nirvana and stuff. They passed on Fugazi tapes and Sonic Youth tapes. I was absorbing all of that when I was 14 or 15. Everyone else was listening to Top 40, and being into counterculture felt like an identity, a special thing, like you belonged to something.”

Sharma took sporadic guitar lessons from a family friend, but is otherwise an autodidact, he tells me. “Both my parents are from Nepal, so we got a lot of Nepalese and Indian music. There wasn’t much common ground. Everyone in the family likes Neil Young, I guess.”

Attending all-ages gigs became a formative part of Sharma’s youthful musical experience. “There was a dead zone in New Brunswick, but there were cool bands coming from Nova Scotia,” he recalls. “I loved Sloan and all the Murderecords stuff. In Fredericton, there was mostly a lot of speed metal and a lot of jam bands. It felt pretty detached from what else was going on.”

In 2005, Spin Magazine published a profile on Montreal’s music scene calling the city the “next Seattle.” Bands like Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade were leading a new wave of rock coming out of the post-Referendum depression that began on the Plateau in the late 1990s.

“That was a huge reason why I moved to Montreal,” Sharma says. “There was an energy to Montreal at that point that probably drew me. Then 10 years after there was another wave. Now there’s another wave. It’s such a cyclical thing. Especially because it’s a city of expats and it’s always reinventing itself.”

This city’s celebrated cultural scenes have perennially been a draw for artists like Sharma looking to achieve a measure of success and satisfaction. Those measures have evolved over the decades, however.

“When I was young, it was all about making it in this industry-standard way,” Sharma declares. “Now, I play small shows in all these venues where I’ve known the promoters and the bartenders and the musicians for years. That’s success now — belonging to this community on the grass-roots level. In our world now, that’s lacking. We’re pretty lucky in Montreal to be able to bond over something that at its core is done from an authentic place. The romantic endeavour,” he admits, “rather than a commercial enterprise is what attracts me.”

Montreal more than other cities seems to thrive on an outsider ethos that relies less on algorithmic forms of discovery and favours more organic sensations. This may help to explain why artists like Sharma thrive here: Montreal is a delicate ecosystem whose constant pressures also ensure art’s perpetual survival, adaptability, and resilience.

“There’s demonstrable proof that some artists have really altered the cultural fabric for good,” Sharma suggests. “I’ve been considering art more through the roll of criticism of capitalism lately. I think being born when I was, my idea of what an artist should be was based on commerce. Selling things. But there’s really a crucial role to play in the community and the local scene. I think authenticity and good music and word-of-mouth will never be replaced. People are looking for something more real.”◼︎

Karma Glider launches From the Haze of a Revved Up Youth Friday 5 September 2025 with Shunk and Poolgirl at Casa del Pololo, 4873 St Laurent.

_{Cover image: Susil Sharma photographed by Yang Shi.}