Wade Lavallee and Donavin Logan craft a timeless reckoning for the spirit.
In just over a year, Canadian alt-rock/folk collective KOYOT has arrived with intention.
Fronted by vocalist/songwriter Wade Lavallee (Calling Rivers) and bassist Donavin Logan, the band has already surpassed 175,000 streams across 140 countries and earned two Saskatchewan Indigenous Music Award nominations.
Their recent Banff Centre residency and upcoming album Acimowina (Cree for “stories”) promise a project unafraid to confront colonisation, loss, and resilience.
But before that full reckoning arrives, KOYOT releases ‘Big Brother,’ a single that proves their artistic depth is as sharp as their mission.
Inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, ‘Big Brother’ breathes the same unease.
Lavallee began writing the track over five years ago, through cold winters and seasons planting trees in the northern boreal forest, and you can feel every layer of that patience.
The song lifts the veil on a society increasingly disconnected from spirit and nature, awakening a generation numbed by digital static and systemic distraction.
Musically, KOYOT leans into their genre-fluid identity. The verses carry a folk-inflected intimacy, Lavallee’s voice weathered but warm, before swelling into an alt-rock chorus that doesn’t explode so much as it presses inward.
Harin Joshi’s lead guitar work aches with restraint, while drummer Dex “Big” Yadlowski grounds the track in a pulse that mimics both a heartbeat and a warning siren.
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Logan’s bassline moves like a slow realisation. This protest anthem is the quieter, more dangerous kind in comparison to most, this is the one you sit with at 2 a.m.
Co-written and composed by Lavallee and Logan in 2025, the track bridges Orwell’s mid-century warnings to our present moment of surveillance, disconnection, and ecological numbness.
Yet KOYOT never preaches. Instead, they offer a lived-in meditation, earned from the soil of the boreal and the weight of history their upcoming album promises to carry.
‘Big Brother’ is a stunning preview of Acimowina: honest, reflective, and necessary.
