New Chance Unveils A World Between World With a 'Rock Unsteady' l Album Out Now via WE ARE TIME
Stream | Preorder | Watch “Phasis”
May 23, 2025 – Today, Toronto-based musician, vocalist, and astrologer New Chance also known as Victoria Cheong, releases the highly anticipated album A Rock Unsteady via We Are Time. Alongside the release is the focus track is bedroom-style acapella track “Phasis” with a vertical music video featuring New Chance in a striking reconstruction of an iconic Alexander McQueen dress. To celebrate the release, New Chance will perform an album release show on June 14, 2025 at The Tranzac in Toronto. Tickets are available here.
During the album’s creative process, Cheong undertook an intensive study of metakosmios, a concept dating back to Ancient Greece, meaning ‘worlds between worlds’–the states between light and dark, spirit and matter, knowing and unknowing, the dreamscape. A Rock Unsteady is the product of that research, an album made for this very stark moment of collective uncertainty, balancing equal parts precarity and potential.
Towards the end of the album, focus track “Phasis” arrives like a quiet revelation. An exploration of “in-between-ness,” the song is intimate and acapella. Recorded alone and bedroom-style, “Phasis” was conceived as an experimental response to a piece by polychromatic composer Delores Catherino, occupying its own unique dimension within the record.
Co-directed by New Chance, Johnny Spence, and Cameron Lee, the music video offers an kaleidoscopic counterpoint to the song. Intentionally designed for smartphone screens, the visuals reflect how we navigate modern living as digital and real worlds increasingly blur. Speaking of the music video, New Chance shares:
“We were interested in the improvised, playful mixing of relatively recent technologies. The end result demonstrates something about the world we live in- a world where we can view or present ourselves through constant slight updates in technology on a multiplicity of screens.”
The music video debuts New Chance in an Alexander McQueen dress reconstructed by costume designer Cameron Lee and notable hat maker Tierre Taylor. Upon reflecting on A Rock Unsteady and its intent, Lee recognized the McQueen dress drawn from the 2000 Eshu collection, named after the Yoruba deity who bridges heaven and earth, as the garment destined for this moment. Reissued by Sarah Burton and shared via ShowStudio, the open-source design channels McQueen’s legacy of colonial critique. Featuring the signature exaggerated Victorian sleeves, body-mapping panels, and sculptural skirt and made with crisp shirting weight cotton, the dress evokes both the history embedded in the original design with the connotation of rumpled bed sheets. Functioning as both garment and screen, it was crafted to hold light, image, and meaning across video, photo, and performance and will stand as a focal point in New Chance’s upcoming appearances in support of the record.
On the record, Cheong brings a wide array of influences that combine spiritual strains of downtempo, dub, house and electronic pop.“There’s complexity in the composition and the ideas. But I also want it to be pleasurable; for it to be delicious and consumable,” Cheong reflects. “Music can be so simple and deep at the same time. This whole record is an exploration of endless depths.”
These depths are further elucidated by a shining cast of players from Cheong’s musical community. The vocal chorus featuring Isla Craig, Robin Dann (Bernice) and Felicity Williams (Bahamas) is a crucial force that appears throughout the album. They are joined by Johnny Spence (The Weather Station, Jeremy Dutcher) who contributes keys, drummer Evan Cartwright (Cola, U.S. Girls) lends his rhythms, Brodie West (Eucalyptus) sits in on saxophone and Jennifer Castle guests with some unusually abstract twang. This marks the first time that Cheong has pulled collaborators so deeply into the New Chance orbit. As her ambitions expand and the project evolves, New Chance becomes more crystalline. A Rock Unsteady is a gem of club-adjacent poetry that refracts the many-layered nature of our living.
