With “Confusion Inland,” North Vancouver’s The Beatroot Road delivers a spellbinding finale to their five-single cycle—a genre-defying journey that’s as emotionally grounded as it is sonically ambitious. Built on a slow-burning, reggae-infused pulse, this track swirls through elements of soul, electronica, and world music, all while resisting the gravity of traditional categorization. It’s less a song and more a sensory tapestry, reflecting on grief with cinematic depth and no need for clear-cut answers.
Maddie Session’s velvety lead vocals, supported by Ramy Zhang’s haunting backing vocals, are buoyed by Mark Russell’s textured instrumentation—bodhrán, organ, and even a cranial bone saw, stitched seamlessly together–and Hazel Fairbairn’s spectral fiddle, which adds an aching melancholy. Lyrically, “Confusion Inland” avoids platitudes, offering instead vivid vignettes of disorientation and quiet persistence. The accompanying video—featuring neural imagery and ambient symbolism—echoes the track’s meditation on traveling to a funeral.
For a project conceived in isolation, The Beatroot Road has emerged as a global collaboration rooted in human connection. With “Confusion Inland,” they affirm their place not just in music, but in movement—blurring boundaries while honoring the universal experience of loss, memory, and the road onward.
