For the follow-up to his much-lauded, Polaris-nominated 2005 debut, Breaking Kayfabe, Cadence Weapon (a.k.a. Rollie Pemberton) decided to tackle Canada’s most surreal economic bubble, calling his new album Urban Sprawl in North Texas. Or at least that’s what it was supposed to be called, until he realized that, having gone from being a normal Edmonton teenager to witnessing the emerging hedonism of the early ’00s dance scene from the inside, maybe that was what he really ought to be making sense of. From a hotel room in Halifax, Cadence explains where Afterparty Babies came from.

In “We Move Away,” you reject the idea that people have to leave their hometowns to be successful. But the line “East Hastings will destroy you,” referring to a sketchy part of Vancouver, makes it sound like you might also be intimidated by big cities. Is that true?
I just see that as more of a comment on the neighbourhood in general. East Hastings is kind of a scary place to me, and I just know people who had to live there. They wanted to go to Vancouver and to live the dream. But I mean, I have friends who moved there and they can’t afford to eat. They end up stealing food from 7-11.

Can you explain what “Real Estate” is about?
Yeah, it’s an extended metaphor, it’s not purely about the real-estate trade. Although it does have those elements to it. My dad was a real-estate agent as well as a DJ. You’ll see in your town, the same kind of names on billboards and posters and bus benches and it’s like, they’re the kings of the city. They’ve got the most houses in the area, they’ve got the cheapest prices, and I feel like that’s exactly the same as battle rap culture. Everybody’s trying to be the top dog, trying to have the most houses in the area. So basically I wanted to juxtapose those two ideas.
At the end of the first verse, I say “you’re on the lease if you’re major label.” A lot of people think I’m saying “leash.” Maybe I am? But it’s kind of the same idea; I’m kind of mortgaging my future.

In “The New Face of Fashion” you mention Halo, the Edmonton bar you shouted out on “Oliver Square,” but saying that none of your friends go there anymore.
The thing with Halo is, when we were first old enough to go to the bar, that was like the cool bar. It was, like, a really hip, sort of upscale sort of bar. But then the paradigm shifted to the point where it was like, it would be just like kind of 35-year-old businessmen, and 17-year-old girls. I don’t know, it started getting creepier and creepier. It reminded me of, kind of, the superclubs that I’ll see in Toronto and LA or something that’ll have, like, metal detectors and shit.

That trendy blog house kind of music seems pretty played out now, but it was getting big a few years ago. The beats on Afterparty Babies are much more complex, but would you say they’re still referencing that music?
In the case of this album, I literally did want to date it. Like, did this come from this period, where everybody was making kind of blog house? Yeah, it did. Because it’s the setting, that’s what I keep saying. The music is literally the setting of where this stuff happened.

It’s a bit bleak out there in hip-hop right now.
I feel like I don’t even know how to find out about rap anymore. I always forget, I actually do like rap. I went and saw the Alkaholiks the other night, and the DJ before was playing tonnes of rap classics, and I was like, man, I love rap! This is good shit! It makes me really happy! I totally forgot that.

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