An overlooked gem from the mid-90s Canadian alt-pop wave, Heroine is a meticulously layered album that rewards headphone listening and close attention. Wild Strawberries' Roberta Carter Harrison sings with a raw, lived-in warmth that buries hooks you won't catch on the first ten spins. Worth pulling off the shelf tonight.
Putting Heroine back on after all these years is like finding a photograph you forgot you took.
You remember the pose, but not the light coming through the window just so. That’s this album.
It came out in 1994, the same year Godzilla-level Canadian rock was stomping through alt-radio via Alanis and Our Lady Peace. Wild Strawberries were smaller. Smarter. They built Heroine in Ken Harrison’s Toronto basement studio, then added layers at Metalworks, a room better known for Rush’s drum sounds.
Roberta Carter Harrison sings like someone who’s been up all night arguing with herself. Not fragile — wry. There’s a reverb on her voice that doesn’t so much wash over the words as sharpen them.
What you missed the first time: the bass playing.
Ken Harrison wrote all the instrumental parts, and he never lets the low end settle. Listen to the title track. That pulsing, almost dissonant bassline slides under the chorus like a counterargument. Most 90s producers would have brickwalled it. Instead, the whole album breathes.
The snare sound is a particular fascination. Engineered by Ken and John Bailey (who worked on some of the best Canadian jazz records of the decade), every hit is dry and close — like the drummer is sitting three feet from you in a small room.
The bridge in “I Don’t Want to Think About It” still hits harder than it has any right to. Roberta drops to a near whisper, and the piano comes in with a chord that holds just a beat too long. It’s a trick of restraint. The kind of thing you only notice when you’re really listening, not just filing the CD back in its jewel case.
There’s a moment in “Crying” where the background vocals split into thirds — Roberta overdubbed herself until the harmonies sounded like a choir of exhausted angels. It’s barely there. But once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.
The production has a tape-warm graininess that digital remasters tend to sand off. Even on a decent pair of headphones, you can feel the air between the instruments. That’s the 90s Canadian budget aesthetic: no money for polish, so they made space instead.
This is not an album that demands you sit through it. It’s an album that repays sitting through. The kind of record you play after the kid is asleep, when the house is finally quiet, and you let the third track run long into the credits.