The electronics come to life on both versions of 'Colonizer,' a brutal song that originated as an alternate soundtrack to the 1922 film Nanook Of The North. The album's wordless songs are almost as riveting as their counterparts. Her voice is backed up by shapeshifting electronics-co-produced by Saul Williams and mixed by Gonjasufi-that mimic organic textures and feel as malleable and unpredictable as her voice. From there, the LP addresses the importance and loss of language ('Tongues'), the power of vulnerability ('Do Not Fear Me') and the weight of generational trauma ('I Forgive Me'). The album opens with a command: 'Eat your morals,' she snarls, in a send-up of vegan activists who have long protested the Inuit practice of subsistence seal hunting, a cause close to Tagaq's heart.

Tongues explores a cultural legacy of death, violence and oppression through uncomfortably personal experiences, and comes out with something like hope, or at least defiant survival. No longer can complicit listeners enjoy this music without thinking about what it means, and what went into creating it.

Her past work laid out its forceful narratives with the alternately foreboding and joyous throat singing technique, but on Tongues Tagaq sings clearly in English (and, occasionally, Inuktitut), using her elastic voice as a discursive weapon, with many lyrics borrowed from her 2018 book Split Tooth. Having worked with artists like Björk and Mike Patton in the past, Tagaq is renowned for her modern take on Inuit throat singing, and has long been embraced by the very institutions she rails against. It's an almost unimaginable, shameful tragedy whose shadow casts over Tongues, an album that boldly points its finger-and righteous words-at the country and society that allowed it to happen.

The First Nations genocide has become a focal point of Canadian cultural discourse following the discovery of unmarked mass graves at schools across the country, hundreds of bodies of dead children who were never found by their families. The lyrics make oblique, if not literal, reference to Canada's long (and recent) history of residential schools, which separated Indigenous children from their families, tried to erase their language and abused (and often killed) them. It's a song about processing past trauma, finding strength in protecting others from what you once went through yourself. 'We were taken too young / I was entered too young,' Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq repeats on 'I Forgive Me,' in a particularly harrowing snapshot of her new album, Tongues.

Split tooth book review