The award-winning Canadian Christian rock band, Critical Mass, is releasing its first album in 8 years on October 5th, 2021. Their seventh release is entitled “Serenity” and is a concept album based on the band frontman David Wang’s life in the past 4 years. “I’ve gone through the trials and tribulations of a divorce,” states Wang. “This album is about my journey through anxiety, depression, family break-up but then, through my faith, friends and counselling, to hope, healing and love. I hope that the album can help others who are going through similar life experiences. In the Christian world, this is a topic that is often avoided but it is one that is very relevant as divorce is afflicting the faithful in numbers not dissimilar to that of the general public.”
The album was released simultaneously on all major music media platforms, including Spotify, Amazon Music, and iTunes as well as on the band’s website at
www.criticalmassmusic.org.
The album release launches with a new single “AlieNation” that is accompanied with a lyric video on YouTube. The song is about parental alienation, a devastating outcome of some divorces and separations. According to the documentary “Erasing Family”, 13% of adults report being alienated from their children. “Parental alienation occurs when one parent influences the children to reject the other parent from their lives,” relates Wang. “In extreme cases, the children will stop seeing the targeted parent and will be openly hostile to any interaction with the targeted parent. The children may even spy on this parent or betray them in other ways. The behaviour resembles what happens in the classic movie ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ where previously amicable family members suddenly change and become alien to their loved ones.” The video for the song AlieNation uses footage from the movie to illustrate this concept. “We were lucky in that the trailer, unlike the movie, is now in the public domain, allowing us to use its footage in our music video” states Wang.
The band celebrated this new album when they hostied a zoom party on Oct 5th. During the event, the new AlieNation music video was premiered along with each of the album’s songs where Wang shared the inspiration behind the lyrics and introduced some of his collaborators on this project, who include Ian Tanner, Andrew Horrocks and Canadian rock icon, Ray Lyell.
Wang is the founder of Critical Mass and has won two Rock Album of the Year honours at the Canadian Gospel Music Associations (CGMA) in 2000 and 2005. The album and song are produced and engineered by Andrew Horrocks of AME Recording Studio, a CGMA Producer of the Year as well as a Juno and Gemini award nominee. They also performed for a million attendees at World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto.
More information can be found at
www.criticalmassmusic.org.