LATCH & DUSTBUSTER at Weldon Park (569 College), February 1.
When an independently released song gets over 50,000 plays on Soundcloud only four days after being posted, you assume there’s a fairly organized campaign behind the artists. And when it turns out the group is from Toronto, you expect to have noticed them playing local clubs regularly.
Latch & Dustbuster’s dreamy, sun-drenched electronic pop tune, Hunter, is undeniably catchy, but that’s not usually enough to make a song stand out from the thousands of uploaded to the internet daily by eager bedroom producers.
When you google “Hunter by Latch [stylized as La+ch] & Dustbuster,” you turn up plenty of blog posts containing a black hole of non-info: “enigmatic Toronto duo,” “no one has really heard of these guys,” “not much information.”
After meeting them in their west-end recording studio/apartment, I realize this wasn’t some carefully plotted teaser campaign of anonymity. They’re not even sure themselves how they managed to rack up so many plays in such a short time.
“We just put it out on Soundcloud and people liked it. The snowball effect, I guess,” Latch offers.
The duo haven’t played live together, although they do have a history performing with hipster rapper Coleman Hell (Latch’s brother), who sits in on the interview as other collaborators and friends float in and out of the room. They talk about their Sideways8 collective, through which they worked with Coleman Hell and on various solo projects. Still, it’s obvious Hunter is the clear standout.
“Sometimes it’s a little bit of luck, but sometimes the song is just actually better,” says Dustbuster.
“Of the songs we’ve put out, I think this is one of the catchiest and most accessible, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s getting the response.”
benjaminb@nowtoronto.com | @benjaminboles
