World News 808909 Are Rewiring Electronic Music With Their Debut Album ON STEROIDS

Photo by : 35mm by Desiree Das Gupta

If you spend enough time in Toronto’s music scene, you eventually hear whispers about a duo doing things “the hard way”, in the best sense. No laptops. No safety nets. Just two people, six tiers of gear, and whatever chaos those blinking machines decide to spit out on any given night. That duo is World News (aka World News 808909), and their debut album ON STEROIDS finally captures the strange, hypnotic world fans have been watching them build live since 2017.

World News isn’t your typical electronic act. They’re more like… technicians of feeling. Everything they do starts with improvisation, literal hands-on, sweat-on-the-knobs, electricity-humming-between-them energy. And because none of their live sets rely on a DAW babysitting the rhythm, their music has this living, breathing quality, like the machines inhale while Bill and Qu exhale. It’s weirdly human, especially for something built from wires and circuits.

And yes, their rehearsal space is a real bank vault. Six feet by eight feet. Full hardware tower. Zero daylight. If that doesn’t explain the intensity of their sound, I don’t know what will.

ON STEROIDS is a culmination of three years of experiments, long nights, rural recording sessions overlooking a lake in Muskoka, and whatever strange emotional rabbit holes the two fell into along the way. The album feels like an ecosystem, a sonic biosphere, where each track breathes into the next. It’s not “easy listening.” It’s more like entering someone else’s universe, which is exactly the point.

Here’s the quick tour:

• HYPE - warm, expressive Moog bliss. It’s like walking down a sunny boardwalk with a Discman in 2003.

• LAST CHANCE - early World News DNA. Think cosmic Ewok Village at night (trust me, you’ll hear it).

• MOVE ON ME - chaotic dance floor energy mixed with “I might miss the future I imagined.” A video is coming in 2026, featuring two hilariously wrong-sized suits.

• EJECTION - starts ambient, ends in techno, feels like losing a fight with your own ego.

• BALLROOM - the soft, emotional center of the album. A maximalist electronic love confession.

• MAGAZINES - pure cyberpunk melancholy. Blade Runner rain, neon, someone pacing on a dock.

• I DON’T KNOW - the slow burn of a truth you don’t want to look at directly.

• JELLYFISH - the friction-pulled closeness of two people who’ve seen each other break and rebuild. Genreless. Just raw feeling.

  
  

It’s the kind of album that lands best when played front to back. There’s context in the sequencing. Weight in the transitions. World News cares about that stuff, not as a gimmick but because their music doesn’t fit neatly into one genre anyway. They’re pulling from IDM, ambient, techno, early 2000s electronica, with little flecks of rock attitude floating around the edges.

This is art music disguised as electronic music. Or maybe it’s electronic music disguised as art. Pick your angle.

World News has been stirring up attention for years, Indie88, Exclaim!, Aesthetic Magazine, Toronto Guardian, and the festival circuit across Ontario, Manitoba, and Alberta. Their previous release, Double A – Another World, had them working with high-level collaborators, including Emmy-winner Brandon Bak and producer Josh Korody. And the music video for their single HYPE? Shot in -30°C on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa. If dedication had a temperature, it would be that.

But the magic of the album isn’t just nostalgia. It’s that the duo managed to fuse their improvised, live-mixed DNA with something polished enough to feel intentional. That balance, raw human instinct vs. careful sculpting, is rare.

This music isn’t for background noise. It’s for people who want to feel something different, maybe even strange, but definitely real.

World News 808909 didn’t just make a debut album, they built a world, plugged it in, and let it breathe on its own. If you’re someone who leans toward music that pushes the edges, loves texture, or just misses when electronic music felt new and curious again, ON STEROIDS deserves a full, undistracted listen.