New Ways is a new album by Montreal’s Leif Vollebekk, his hotly anticipated follow-up to the Polaris Prize finalist Twin Solitude. It’s a record that lives between the kick and the snare, in that instant of feeling before the backbeat. In the end, New Ways is a document of everything Vollebekk felt, the way each moment arrived and moved through him. Whereas Twin Solitude was about self-reflection, New Ways is about engaging and changing, touching and being touched. It’s a physical record, with louder and tighter grooves, and the rawest lyrics the musician has ever recorded. A portrait of beauty, desire, longing, risk, remembrance - without an instant of regret. There’s the heat of the night and the cool blue of morning, hints of Prince and Bill Withers, the limbo of a lover’s transatlantic flight. Hot Tears is all hot-blooded memory. Apalachee Plain is a clamorous goodbye. I’m Not Your Lover would be a perfect love-song were it not for its chorus - a song that lets two opposites be true at once.